"Light and Wind of Haikupohja"

2023/10/13

From September 2015 to October 2021, I was privileged to continue a series of 74 installments in the magazine "Ongaku no Tomo." The first 24 installments, titled "The 80-Year-Old's Attic," described my relationships with various composers, while the remaining 50 installments, titled "Light and Wind of Haikupohja," were a collection of my occasional reflections without a specific theme. Haikupohja is my villa in Central Finland, 230 kilometers north of Helsinki. Every summer, my wife Maria and I spend two months there quietly by ourselves; the surroundings are nothing but forests and lakes, and we rarely see anyone. There was no running water, and we used spring water for drinking.

In compiling this into a single book, I organized the content into two parts. One is about the composers I have been involved with throughout my long life, and the other is about the countries I have traveled to as a performer and the people I met there. The figure of a pianist who continues to travel while performing is, in a sense, like a monk or a mendicant priest, and the relationships with various people and nature that emerge therein are once-in-a-lifetime encounters.

"Humans are born to die." Takashi Tachibana, known as a giant of intellect, was deeply moved by these words spoken by an elderly indigenous person on a South Pacific island. In the creation myth of the Navajo, a Native American people, a wind god named Nilch'i Ligai gives life to all living things on this earth at the time of their birth. Humans live only as long as the wind blows inside their bodies; when the wind stops, they lose their words and die. Michio Mamiya's work "Signs of the Wind" was inspired by these words. On the other hand, Yoshinao Nakada, who was drafted during the war, was matter-of-fact: "Since I'm going to die anyway, I wanted to die in an intellectual way, so I volunteered for the air corps. People seeing me off told me I'd come back alive, but such platitudes were useless; there was no way I would return alive." After the war, Nakada returned to the world of composition and left behind masterpieces such as "Summer Memories" and "The City Where Snow Falls." Among the composers were those who attended the Juku, such as Hikaru Hayashi and Takashi Yoshimatsu, and I wanted to write about the inner thoughts they each expressed.

On March 26, while I was writing, my wife Maria passed away. It was cancer. We spent the last three weeks together at home without pain or suffering. In the room next to her sickbed, she watched me write 20 new chapters and play the piano. Just like always.

"Light and Wind of Haikupohja"

Izumi Tateno

Ongaku no Tomo Sha

272 pages, 2,530 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations, titles, etc., are as of the time of publication.