1926

1926 is both the year Janáček composed the Sinfonietta and a historical hinge in Aomamé’s reflections: a moment that seemed to its inhabitants to promise peace, even as later catastrophes remained unknowable. Through the music, the novel links European and Japanese histories while giving concrete form to Aomamé’s conviction that events belong to a chronology and a place.

A year in the music

Janáček composed the short symphony in 1926. Its principal theme had originally been intended for a fanfare at a sporting event. Listening to the Sinfonietta, Aomamé imagines the year in which it was written, letting the music open into a meditation on the past rather than treating it as mere background to the taxi ride.

The precarious calm of Europe

Aomamé pictures Czechoslovakia after the First World War, newly free of the long Habsburg domination. People drink Pilsner beer in cafés, make effective and finely crafted machine guns, and enjoy the brief peace visiting Central Europe. Kafka, still little known, has died two years earlier. Hitler is yet to appear as the force that will quickly overwhelm the country. From the later vantage point of history, the calm is fragile; for the people living through 1926, the disaster ahead has not happened and cannot yet be known.

A parallel turn in Japan

The same year marks the death of Emperor Taishō and the beginning of the Shōwa era. In Aomamé’s account, Japan too is approaching a dark and terrible period: modernism and democracy have had their brief interlude, and fascism will impose its rule. Placing these developments beside the European scene makes 1926 more than a date in a musical biography. It becomes a point from which apparently separate histories turn toward danger.

Historical knowledge and its limits

Aomamé is drawn to history and sport, but not especially to novels. She values historical writing that joins events to a precise chronology and place, and dates come easily to her once she understands how the events fit together. Her thoughts about 1926 exemplify that habit: she moves from the composition of a piece of music to political change across two countries, tracing how a particular moment acquires significance through what follows. Yet the central lesson is also a limit on hindsight: at the time, nobody knew what was coming. The year’s meaning lies in the gap between the order history can later reveal and the uncertainty in which people actually lived.