Read Online One Morning Like a Bird by Andrew Miller - Free Book Online

would take too long, says Feneon, to educate the young men’s palates. For them there is beer in bottles that have been plugged for an hour into the snow of the garden.
        Holding up his wine to the lamplight, tilting the glass, Feneon smiles lugubriously and says, in a low voice to Yuji at his side, that this time drinking red wine will be his only contribution to the defence of his country, his only patriotic act. Yuji nods, frowns, and thinks of the photograph in the study, the one that shows what Feneon did last time, the picture of the young soldier with his blond beard leaning with one of his comrades against the tracked, man-high wheel of an artillery piece. He longs to ask him how it was, what it was like to be a soldier, whether he was scared, scared all the time, but Junzo is doing his Chaplin walk, Beatrice is leaping at his heels, Alissa is helpless with laughter, and the moment is lost.
        When they have devoured the cake, they sit around the stove for the evening’s discussion. It’s Shozo’s turn to choose the subject. He removes his glasses, blinks, puts the glasses on again, and with great seriousness, in good French, tells them that the question for debate is ‘Which of all the arts should be accounted the most sublime?’
        ‘Well,’ says Feneon, reaching for the wine bottle, ‘that should keep us busy.’
        Having proposed the question, Shozo begins a defence of folk art, in particular those ancient dances still seen at country fairs and which, in his opinion, represent an unbroken tradition stretching back to the very origins of  . . .
        Oki rolls his eyes. Folk dances might be all right for peasant farmers in Tohoku, but for everyone else  . . . ‘What about architecture? The Chrysler Building, the Bauhaus  . . . why can’t we build like that in Tokyo? Why doesn’t Tokyo look like New York? Maybe we need another earthquake.’ He turns and quickly, in Japanese, apologises to Yuji, who excuses him with a blink and starts on his own small speech, arguing not for poetry but for what he assumes would have been Feneon’s choice. Cinema, he says, is where the arts are brought together. All the most interesting artists now are film-makers. Isn’t Jean Renoir even greater than his father, Auguste? And who in Japan deserves more attention than Yasujiro Ozu or Mikio Naruse?
        He’s warming to it, beginning to enjoy himself, the sound of himself, the accent he has worked so hard at, when Alissa cuts across him. Theatre, she says, is superior to cinema because a live performance is always superior to a recorded one. However many times a play is put on, however familiar the actors are with their parts, each performance is unique.
        This, thinks Yuji, is an absurd objection. (And should a nineteen-year-old girl in the company of men, all of them, with the exception of Oki, at least a little older than her, express herself in such a forthright manner? Even for a foreign girl it is surely slightly improper.) He does not look at her, but assumes the tone of a professor whose lecture has been  needlessly interrupted by one of his students. All performances, he says, regardless of whether they are filmed, have, at the moment of their enactment, the self-same quality of the unique. Celluloid is but a method of preserving this, which means therefore it remains, permanently, or at least in a practical, but also perhaps in an ontological sense, even at the thousandth time of showing—
        ‘I’m not sure,’ says Alissa, ‘anyone understands what you’re saying.’
        ‘My opinion,’ says Junzo, ‘is that in debates of this type one should always side with the person who knows how to make chocolate cake.’
        ‘Aren’t we forgetting music?’ asks Feneon.
        ‘In the West you have music,’ says Oki. ‘Here we have twanging.’
        ‘I’d rather have the music of the shamisen ,’ says Alissa, sharply, ‘than almost anything. I’m bored to