REVIEW #19: HONEYBEES AND DISTANT THUNDER IS A CREATIVE EXPLOSION!

Honeybees and Distant Thunder
By Riku Onda
Transworld Publishers, 2023

From the outset, Riku Onda challenges the establishment by exposing the competitive world of piano competitions and the pressures and prejudices that rule them. An assembly line of music, teachers, prestigious schools, relentless practice, strict performance conventions. competitions, winners, fame and the whole stressful cycle of pursuing musical success churns through each generation of hopefuls − and their maestros −  all striving for time in the spotlight. Each competitor makes their ambitious way along the most prestigious path of those maestros who came before them and whose lives are dedicated to moulding the next generation in their image, in an industry that is as cut-throat and competitive as any other. Camouflaged by the beauty and emotion of the masterpieces, music has been reduced to just another product responding to the law of supply and demand by relentless consumerism.

AN EXPLORATION OF CREATIVITY AND THE THINGS THAT THREATEN OR REFINE IT.

Onda introduces her theme through the fierce argument over a ring-in who doesn’t understand the competition conventions and hierarchy of power and status that underpin the whole edifice. From my reading, I believe she is using the Yoshigae International Piano Competition to foreshadow a bigger philosophical debate that rages in every era: do we champion the new, or maintain the status quo? One gets the impression that this is an argument that could be attached to any of our social structures, conventions and institutions. This is reinforced through the character of Masami who is tasked with making a documentary following an old school friend on his journey through the competition. She approaches the task with excitement, but also a growing apprehension as she observes ‘so cut-throat was the whole business now that competitions had become like warring fiefdoms.’ Through her troubled contemplation of the multi-layered stresses of the many involved in these competitions, from the sponsors to the piano tuners, families, teachers and competitors, Onda sounds a warning gong that something that should be natural and pleasurable can be turned into something contrived that stifles creativity and strips away the pleasure. Being an international competition seems to reinforce the sense that this is not an issue specifically targeting Japanese society, or the music industry. It feels more like a parable warning of the danger of allowing institutions to enslave humans, instead of serving them. To give you some idea of the complexity, paradoxically, Onda also shows that the competition has a significant, positive, creative and social impact on many of the musicians. (Despite the obvious symbolic analogy, this is not a black and white argument.)
Memory seems to be a significant motif from the opening passages where one of the characters remembers the sounds of nature and the way they were associated with the feel of the wind, the colours of the grass and the trees and the drumming of rain and the buzzing of bees. Onda launches the reader straight into the idea that we are surrounded by sound. Nature nurtures us through sound. Our first music is brought to us by nature being experienced, smelt, and heard. Nature is a dynamic artform. Through Jin, Onda proffers us the argument that music needs to be experienced in the present – it was ‘meaningless unless it was alive in the present.’ It was made new by each performer. It wasn’t ‘a relic from the past,’ but an outworking of the inner world of the performer’s memories of landscapes that had introduced them to the world of music. He argues that ‘nature lay inside the performers bound up in their memories and in their very organs so that, ‘as they played, their own bountiful nature bound up in these memories was expressed.’  When Jin became a part of this confined world of the music hall competition, his burning desire was ‘to liberate the music from this dark container, from this thick-walled jail where it was comfortably guarded.’ He was the only character who enjoyed freedom from the demands of the competition that had narrowed the lives of the other competitors to a single, overriding goal and cut them off from the glory of nature and the gift of its music. Little by little, Onda showed that the genius of each of the musicians was restored and revealed in its full glory, when they reached into the memories of the music of nature and their authentic experiences and used this to freely, and boldly, reinterpret the music of the past masters, rather than be restricted by a desire to slavishly reproduce the notes. No matter how technically brilliant they were, the genius of their musicianship was in their capacity to take their listeners back out to the natural world through the portals of their memories.
My impression is that Riku Onda is also fascinated by the creative process. Even though these competitors were not composing the piece, they were creatively reinterpreting it and occasionally had the opportunity to write their own cadenzas and also to order their recital in creative ways that enabled the composers to speak in new ways through the links they made in the order of their pieces. Onda asked many question throughout the book and one of them, asked by composer of one of the pieces, was telling: Do you think a composer really understands his own work?’ That may seem a strange question, but I would posit that any creative person has been aware that they don’t know why their ideas come, why they follow a particular path and why, when they look back at them – or other comment on them – there are elements of the work that they were not even aware of that have worked together to convey, or reinforce, a certain message, or idea. I loved Onda’s determination to explore the mystery of creativity. Every one of the competitors went on a different journey and wrestled with different aspects of their creativity. There was no attempt to stereotype genius, just to recognize it and appreciate it.

But then Onda pulls us up with this statement from the composer, Hishinuma: ‘From the beginning, music is everywhere, and we capture it and write it down as notes. And then perform it. We don’t create it − we merely translate it … a heavenly being entrusts us with their voice and we pass it along.’ At that, we are left wondering whether there is any such thing as creativity, after all. Do we participate in the creative process, or just receive it as a gift? This is reinforced through the story of the Buddhist sculptor who believed that he wasn’t creating something, but ‘unearthing the Buddha that’s buried within the wood.’ This is not an uncommon belief in those sculptors who work in marble also. Later, Yuji Von Hoffman (who mentors a young man who is not confined by preconceptions of what music is and the way it should be played) uses an agricultural analogy saying,

‘you give water to help things grow, and you adjust your work
according to the rain, and changes in the wind and temperature.
One day the flowers unexpectedly bloom, and you can gather them.
No one knows what sort of fruit their labours will bear. You can only
see it all as a gift, one that outstrips human understanding.’

These are fascinating theories about the nature of creativity. In my own writing, I have many poems that focus on the inexplicable process of creativity. Sometimes, it strikes me as quite comical that we give rules and forms and structures and techniques to what we create, as if that will somehow legitimize something we cannot otherwise explain. I feel that is what Onda is suggesting in the thoughts and conversations between her characters.
We are also reminded that, once we have created something, it is out of our hands. People will interpret it as they wish. Respond to it as they wish. Critique it and analyse it, irrespective of the creator’s goals and messages and motivation for making it. In that process, she also addresses the fact that creativity is a lonely business that makes you vulnerable to gossip and unsuitable relationships which can be distracting from your creative process and the development of your gift. And she challenges those who have settled for denying their gift, in order to avoid the gruelling work of refining that must be done, in order to reach beyond the limits that appear obtainable to new frontiers of creativity. Onda also distinguishes the highly talented from the true genius, something that may be controversial in this era where every player wins a prize, every child receives a certificate of participation, nobody records the score because nobody is allowed to lose.
I have pages and pages of notes from this book. So much is going on. Thank you, if you are still with me! There is so much more, but I won’t continue. However, I want to point out the many, many analogies used by Onda which are original and so applicable in every case, always building the multi-layered arguments she is making. Who would have imagined that a piano competition lasting for eleven days could provides such rich material for exploring so many themes. I should disclose that I play the piano and write music, so I have a natural affinity for the vehicle she has used to make her points. (I wish I had even a tenth of the talent of the least able competitor!!! Sadly, I am not a pianist’s bootlace.) For that reason, I can’t be sure how other readers would find the book, if they were not a pianist (of sorts) and poet. For me, I couldn’t put the book down – quite literally. I read right through till 4:30 one night! Anyway, I hope that, if you decide to seek out this book, you are as enthralled with it as I was. I certainly intend to search for more from this writer. By the way, this novel was the first to win both the Naoki Prize and the Japan Bookseller’ Award and she is the No.1 bestselling author in Japan.