I'm up to my eyelashes in work, and if I'm not working there's at least one more thing I could be doing for Yuletide, but here I am posting anyway. No photos today sorry, I will have some for the end of the year.

・I may have had my mind a little too much on Yuletide the other day at the weird high school; they have until Friday at five to turn in their outstanding assignments for the term, and Lu-kun from the JSL class was announcing that he was going to show up on Friday at four to hand his in. I couldn't help saying "What if you get hit by a bus on Friday at three?"

・A-Pei taught me "May the Force be with you" in Chinese, 愿力量与你同在.

・The radio here always runs the summer Bayreuth season for a week at this time of year, late at night, God knows why. This time there were two operas featuring Klaus Florian Vogt, one of my very favorite singers, a gorgeously pure tenor sound even now that he's getting a bit older.

・New composer discovered! Elfrida Andrée, who is sort of "Schumann, except if he were female and Swedish and much more emotionally stable." Well recommended.

・A class of little kids flying kites in the park visible from my desk, running around like mad on the baseball ground with white kites coming and going over their heads.

Be safe and well.

I have three people on my mind right now; I've never met any of them, and one of them has been dead for almost twenty-five years. As good a time as any to write about them.
Last night I was listening to Lohengrin on the radio (every year between Christmas and New Year's, NHK radio plays that year's Bayreuth season, one opera a night, starting at 9 pm and lasting into the wee hours) and the title role was sung by Klaus Florian Vogt. God damn but that man can sing! Last year and for a couple of years before he was Walther in Meistersinger, and I wish they'd kept him there, I like the music better. Even in Lohengrin, though, that voice carries me away. I've heard it described as "a Mozartian tenor of Wagnerian dimensions," and that's not far off; in a way it's almost like a male alto or soprano, only anchored in the tenor range. His high notes sound as natural and easy as the rest of the range. Crystalline. I wish to God he'd branch out and make some more recordings--I'd give anything to hear him sing the Dichterliebe, or the tenor solo in Verdi's Requiem. Or even the title role in Candide, although that's really more for a high baritone than a true tenor. Hell, anything, if he'd only record more.

It may not be quite fair to say I've never actually met the second person on my mind, since we have in fact communicated by email. Hara Takeshi is a Japanese nonfiction author who writes mostly about trains and emperors and the connections thereamong (that can't be a word, can it?) and the remarkable range of historical, sociological, personal, and literary ideas and happenings which can be connected to trains or emperors or both. Two pieces of trivia: one, he has the same name as Inspector Takeshi Hara of James Melville's Otani detective series, a policeman subordinate to Superintendent Otani who is depicted as sweet-natured, scholarly, and unexpectedly attractive to women. Both first and last names are common, and in any case the fictional Hara Takeshi made his appearance well before the adulthood of the actual one, but I like the coincidence. Two, he seems to be a genuinely nice person--as noted above, I wrote him a fan letter by email and got a prompt and pleasant response, and a colleague who sent him an academic paper reports a similar experience. His train books are funny and thoughtful, formidably researched, with the author's interest and excitement and concern coming through every line--but never dwelling too much on the author himself. Nor is he limited to trains: a book about the strange socio-politico-educational happenings which inflected his fifth- and sixth-grade experience remains subtly shocking and inspiring, in a backwards kind of way, no matter how many times I think back over it. It's immensely exciting to draw parallels between that book and his biography of the Taisho Emperor (ruled 1912-1926), having to do with ideas about the individual and the group, and the mixed horror and seduction of becoming part of the group, and the unwitting correspondences between the far left and the far right, and ... okay, I'll leave off for now and try to write a paper on this later!

The third person on my mind is dead. His name was Takanori Ohira; he was born, probably in Osaka, probably in 1954. He attended the Osaka Education University Attached Tennoji High School, he won or placed highly in at least two national competitions as a violinist while in his teenage years, he went to Tokyo University and while there was concertmaster of the university orchestra, he spent time as a visiting researcher at a certain Ivy League university probably in the early 1980s, he became an assistant professor of metallurgy at Tokyo University, and he committed suicide in 1987.
Almost all the information I've just listed comes from a bout of Internet research; Google is amazing, for good or ill. Only the first and last facts, his name and the manner of his death, are what I had before. Why is he on my mind now? Well, because I was listening to the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and I remembered, as I always do, my father talking about it. When Takanori Ohira was studying in America, my father was the conductor of the university orchestra where he was, and they did the Tchaikovsky concerto together. "Any audience will applaud after the end of that first movement," he would say, playing me the tape. "Taka was really a fantastic violinist. It's too bad..." . My father died eleven years ago, of natural causes--if cancer is natural--and I miss him. Thinking of him, and of people out of reach, I got to want to know more about Takanori Ohira. I wish I could meet someone who knew him. I wish I could have met him. His career, both musically and scientifically, describes pretty much the highest arc any Japanese might aspire to, and I wonder if his death was "because" or "in spite of" or something more complex. ご冥福を祈る。