...But achieving this dream was not a foregone conclusion. After the war had ended, Takemitsu’'s family moved to Asaka’'s neighborhood, and Takemitsu earned money selling cigarettes and gum on the black market, and eventually finding work as a ‘band boy’ at an American military base in Yokohama. Given access to the facilities during the day, Takemitsu taught himself to play piano and also learned English. Still, when he was sixteen, Takemitsu showed signs of tuberculosis and was eventually hospitalized in 1953.Asaka, who also shared the same illness, though to less serious degree, cared for him at the hospital, and following Takemitsu'’s release in 1954, the couple started to live together. In these interviews, Asaka relates how, even in the depth of poverty and illness after the war, Takemitsu never gave up on being a composer and always remained optimistic; she highlights how Toru owed so much of his success to those people who helped him; he indeed had many friends. This volume is, perhaps more than anything else, a testament to Takemitsu’s wonderful friendship with composers, artists, writers, and performers with whom he came into contact throughout his life.
Two months before the war ended, the fifteen-year-old Takemitsu was forced to work at a military provisions base in the mountains in Saitama prefecture. It was a bitter experience for him, but it was in those extreme circumstances that he decided to become a composer. Although listening to foreign music was prohibited and those in camp were only allowed to sing military songs, one day in an underground dugout, a cadet secretly let him and other interns listen to the French chanson Parlez-moi d'amour by Lucienne Boyer on a wind-up gramophone. While other interns were amused by this forbidden music, it came as an enormous shock to the young impressionable Takemitsu. As he described later, “I didn’t know this kind of sweet and beautiful music existed. It felt as if electricity has gone through my body, and my whole flesh and blood had become totally enthralled with that music. That was when I decided that I wanted to ‘be in music’ once the war was over.”
© Asaka Takemitsu, Tomoko Isshiki All rights reserved.