One rainy November night, after three cups of sake, Felix pulled out his violin鈥攁 modest instrument, but the only thing he had left from his dead wife鈥檚 dowry. O-Kuni listened to him play the Adagio of the 鈥淒eath and the Maiden鈥� quartet, transposed for solo. When he finished, she said something in Japanese. Kenji translated softly: 鈥淪he says that your music walks on crutches, but it is trying to dance.鈥�
His assigned interpreter was a young man named Kenji Tanaka, a graduate of Keio University who had never left Japan but spoke German like a Viennese civil servant. 鈥淧rofessor Adler,鈥� Kenji said, bowing exactly fifteen degrees, 鈥渕y grandfather learned German from a doctor in Nagasaki. I learned it from books. Please forgive my accent.鈥� Austria - Japonia
Then she picked up a pencil and began to write. One rainy November night, after three cups of
The journey took forty days. He crossed the Alps, the Danube plains, the Urals, the frozen Baikal, and at last the yellow Sea of Japan. When he stepped onto the platform at Shimbashi Station, Tokyo swallowed him whole鈥攏ot with noise, but with a kind of courteous absence of echo. The air smelled of cedar and charcoal. He did not understand a single word anyone said. Kenji translated softly: 鈥淪he says that your music
In the autumn of 1913, before the world forgot how to laugh, a lonesome train steamed out of Vienna鈥檚 Westbahnhof. On board was Felix Adler, a fifty-year-old musicologist with a walrus mustache and a heart bruised by unplayed sonatas. He carried two things: a leather valise stuffed with scores by Haydn and Schubert, and a letter from the Imperial Academy offering him a year鈥檚 post at the University of Tokyo. Austria had grown too small for his grief. Japan, he hoped, would be large enough for silence.