Memoirs of a Shattered Soul — 08: An Unusual Birthday
Today is my sixteenth birthday. I received a number of gifts that I will cherish, but the best gift of all is the one I could give away to others.
May 12, 2013
Today is my sixteenth birthday. It was, without a doubt, the strangest birthday I’ve ever had in my life. And also, without a doubt, it was a day that made me truly happy, which nowadays is not such an easy thing.
Of course, on birthdays it’s customary to receive gifts. I was given a number of them today that I will cherish. My father gave me a beautiful Dior dress. My aunt had brought two presents from Japan, the latest CD of Mika Nakashima, “Real” and also a book from my best friend Sachiko, The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa. Marilyn gave me partitions for violin versions of the music of Ludovico Einaudi, an Italian composer.
However, from weeks ago Marilyn had also challenged me to use my birthday as a way of “bringing a blessing to others” as she phrased it. With this in mind, she arranged for me to give a special concert at l’Oasis.
Considering that at the best of times I’m a rather shy and private person and more recently I have been a complete emotional wreck who even weeps while visiting waterfalls, my first inclination was to gently but firmly refuse. However, Marilyn can be a very persuasive woman when she wants to be.
She read me the story of “A Very Unusual Banquet.” Or at least, that’s how I think of it. It’s actually a parable in the Bible, found in Luke 14. Essentially, in the story a man prepares a sumptuous feast and invites his friends to dine with him. All of them refuse, for one reason or another. So the man sends his servants out into the streets and alleys of the town to find those who are poor, crippled, lame and blind and invite them to the banquet hall instead.
In a similar fashion, during these last few weeks Marilyn and I have been visiting places that I would never have thought of going to by myself to invite people to my concert. We went to an orphanage, two hospitals, a centre for recovering drug and alcohol addicts. We also visited Mr. Abelard Hauser in Interlaken twice. In each case I brought my violin and shared the magic of music with everyone we met.
And so these are the people who were at my birthday tonight. The very young and the very old. Patients in wheelchairs or with dark glasses covering blind eyes. A few recovering drug addicts. Marilyn had prepared a banquet for them and as they feasted I played music, looking rather more elegant than usual in my new Dior dress. Hardly anyone would suspect that I was the same shattered soul who has been moping about Lauterbrunnen for the last four months.
Apart from the people mentioned above, the mayor of Lauterbrunnen was also in attendance along with his wife. Also, I must not forget to mention that I was accompanied on the piano by another young musician, twenty year old Ansel Hauser—the grandson of my new friend, the conductor in Interlaken.
We had been practising together for almost a month. No matter what I played on the violin, it seemed as though Ansel knew it already and could play the piano part without needing sheet music. There was only one moment when he stopped me to suggest a change.
It was at our very first rehearsal together. I started the theme from Schindler’s List and after a moment I noticed he was not following me.
I looked at him quizzically. He said simply, “I don’t think we should play this song, Yukiko. It will make my grandfather sad.”
I remembered my first visit to Interlaken and the look I’d seen in Abelard Hauser’s eyes. “Yes, you’re right. I remember that he was sad when I played it for him before, but I don’t understand why.”
Ansel looked at me thoughtfully. “Have you ever seen the film?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I was too young to watch it. Even though my mother wanted me to learn the music.”
Ansel nodded and even smiled, but only briefly. “The story is about life in a German concentration camp in Poland called Płaszów. At the end, some of the prisoners are sent to Auschwitz. It brought back bad memories for my grandfather. In 1943, when he was five years old, he was a prisoner in Auschwitz with his parents and his twin brother. He was the only one who survived.”
I don’t know exactly why but this information seemed hard for my mind to grasp. That’s the thing about being young and ignorant: everything that happened before I was born seems slightly unreal to me, even though in reality that includes most of human history. And if it happened outside of Japan, it might as well have been on a different planet.
After that conversation Ansel and I never talked about the theme from Schindler’s List again. We didn’t play it at the concert tonight, obviously. I didn’t want to make our guests feel sad. I wanted to play music that would lift their spirits, and by doing this I was lifting mine as well.
This strategy seemed to work well. Ansel and I played for a little more than an hour, but the time seemed to go by swiftly… or rather, it didn’t seem as though time had passed at all. The applause at the end was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.
Well… almost the sweetest sound. The icing on the cake came a few minutes later when my father and my Aunt Hanami were congratulating me.
Hanami said to me, “Yukiko-chan, you look so much like your mother.”
I’m sure that many aunts have said this to their nieces on many different occasions, but my circumstances were different. My mother was a glamourous actress and model and famous pop singer beloved by millions. Aunt Hanami had never said those words to me before.
I went to a mirror and looked at my reflection. It was mildly shocking to see that my aunt was right. Shocking, but it also made me happy.
Let me be clear: I am not my mother, and never will be. I have no desire to ever be famous or idolised myself. However, right now my mother is in a coma and I honestly don’t know if she will ever awaken. Yet as long as I’m alive a piece of her will always be here in this world. A piece of her heart, her spirit and her love. And I want to honour that in the way I live.