When I wrote my response to the counselor, I did not have a very clear structure of my talk yet; on the contrary, bits of various ideas were all mixed up in my mind and striving to find the way out in an intelligible form. All I knew from the beginning was that I would start the class with telling my first encounter with English which took place at my early teenage. English came into my life as the sound of music. My mother who didn't have the chance to learn English while young on account of World War II (Japanese military government strictly forbade people to study and use their "enemy's language") trusted the dream to her eldest daughter. She took me to see the famous American movie "The Sound of Music" when it came to a local theater in a town of Kyushu Island in 1965, exactly 20 years after the end of the war. Both the mother and the daughter were overwhelmed by the torrent of the melodious sound and the beautiful scenes. I never thought of the strange combination of Julie Andrews speaking English with her British accent in the story developing in Austria under Nazis seizure. I was just fascinated with the sound of a foreign language.
Since then for more than 30 years my enthusiasm to acquire it has not faded. It has become my occupation (profession?) to teach English. Now my love of the language brought me all the way to Charlottesville, Virginia. I found myself writing in my second e-mail reply to the counselor how my interest in English made me conscious of "language at large" and how I came to realize the uniqueness of my mother tongue and its tradition. I decided to expose American young students to the foreign sound in my elective class. I also made up my mind to let them listen to the music of a contemporary Japanese young composer with the compact discs which I brought from my country. The counselor seemed a little perplexed at my idea of the introduction of music into the writing workshop. I purposefully did not clarify my intention because I wanted the participants to think about what music can and what language can not do. I was very much looking forward to seeing the reaction of young writers when they find the reason of my choice.
I had a week of preparation for my class. In the library, I used the computer search engine of the book catalog to see what I could obtain concerning "Haiku" here in the ground of UVA. Not much. At home, I used the Internet to look for the relevant Japanese web sites. To my surprise, there were several remarkable ones introducing the tradition of "Haiku" in English. I felt it was ironical that I should search for the information of my own country from afar and also that "browsing" nowadays does not necessarily mean the activity among actual bookshelves but more often the exploration in the cyber space. The text and its translation I found on-line looked reliable so that I made up several pages of handout editing the results of my research. I thought of the visual impact of my native tongue, too. My mobile computer installed with Macintosh operating system in its Japanese version shows both Japanese characters and alphabet in one screen like this:
Eight teenagers and two counselors came to my elective class. I asked everybody if she/he has ever learned any foreign languages. French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Latin were the answers. Good variety for a group of ten. There was even a student who has just come back from her "home-stay" in Japan. After I talked of my personal encounter with English, I went on to the introduction of my mother tongue. I presented four different types of characters we use for writing Japanese language (showing the charts I made), a front page of a newspaper (where there is a column on short poems every day) , and sample master pieces of haiku which I copied on large sheets of drawing paper in Japanese. I showed several photos which are depicting the four seasons we live year after year. Haiku has been the vehicle to express Japanese people's sensibility closely connected to the natural environment which transforms itself according to the transit of the seasons. It has been so since the 16th century. Evidently the brevity of the expression is the crucial moment of the continuing tradition. If it is hard to find a real "old pond" in such a busy place like Tokyo today, our language still passes the emotion and the nuance of the phrase to the generations to come. I read aloud several haiku pieces in Japanese no matter how strange it might have sounded to American students. The strangeness and foreignness, I believe, are the starting point of our mutual understanding. They were intently paying attention to my talk to know what I was trying to say. Throughout the session the quiet music was filling the classroom.
I felt ninety minutes passed immediately. Indeed I could talk very little of the essence of haiku poetry. There was no time for participants to write haiku of their own during the session. (All of them have ever learned about haiku when they were elementary school students and knew its form fairly well. If I had let them write, they must have produced something original for sure but I dared not make my session the place for practice.) Instead, I asked them to write about the music they were listening almost unconsciously meanwhile. I asked them three questions: 1) What kind of impression did they get, listening to the music?; 2) What kind of a person did they think composed the music?; 3) Write any image they got from the music freely in prose. Students looked puzzled at my request; for, there seemed to be no connection between my talk and the music.
When I collected the paper, I disclosed my intention. The music, which is the simple combination of the piano, the flute, and the violin faithfully observing the tradition of Western classic music, was composed by a Japanese young musician who has heavy mental handicaps. He had a fatal defect in his brain when he was born. He survived but did not utter a word until he became 5 years old. The first phrase he spoke was telling the name of a bird which he heard with his father in the woods. His father then recognized that the son had the listening ears and keen sense to the sound. His mother let him listen to music all the time. His "intelligence" in terms of language as the tool for communication remained that of 5 year old but through the habit of listening to music and devoted instruction of a piano teacher, he acquired the composition of music. Voluntary musicians (all highly eminent professionals) offered to play his music, finding something really genuine in the short pieces. The composer, Hikari Oe, has released only two discs so far; yet, they give incomparable joy and healing to listeners. Brevity and simplicity do not matter. Through music he expresses his innermost feelings (including both humor and agony) to the world. Music can do what language cannot. Fluency and eloquence in language are powerless sometimes. My message to the young writers was that when we write, whatever it might be, we should write what we really need to. Only the irresistible urge for expression can give life to our writing. I added an information that Hikari Oe is a son of a Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1994.
A sort of silence filled the classroom. The sound of music was still coming from the player. I concluded the class with presenting my own two pieces of haiku which I wrote for the workshop: