Shozaburo Takitani

Shozaburo Takitani, the father of Tony Takitani, is a jazz trombonist whose life moves through upheaval without much apparent inward reckoning. He leaves prewar Japan for Shanghai, survives imprisonment after the war, returns to a country in which his family has vanished, and builds a modestly successful musical life. His unreflective resilience stands in contrast to Tony’s precision, reserve, and eventual burden of memory; the old jazz records he leaves behind give that contrast a tangible afterlife.

Identity and Departure for Shanghai

Shozaburo is a fairly well-known Japanese trombonist. Although his son’s name, curly hair, and sculpted features lead people to assume that Tony is of mixed ancestry, both parents are Japanese. The story’s account of Shozaburo begins with his departure from Tokyo four years before the Second World War broke out. A problem involving a woman forces him to leave, but he chooses to go farther, crossing to China with only his trombone and little attachment to the possessions he leaves behind.

Shanghai quickly becomes the place he prefers. On a boat traveling up the Yangtze River, he sees the city’s avenues in the morning light and feels drawn to the future they seem to promise. At twenty-one, he appears ready to take life as it comes rather than weigh what leaving means. That ease is not presented as a considered philosophy: he has little interest in history or introspection, and his ambitions remain immediate—music, meals, and female company.

War, Imprisonment, and Return

During the Japanese invasion of China, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombings of Japan, Shozaburo continues to play in Shanghai nightclubs, regarding the war as something happening at a distance. His self-absorption coexists with sociability and kindness: he is described as both modest and arrogant, yet people generally like him. Handsome, young, and capable on his instrument, he is popular and successful with women.

The end of the war breaks the apparent ease of this existence. His connections bring him to the attention of the Chinese Army, and he is imprisoned. Other Japanese prisoners are taken from their cells and executed without trial; the daily pistol shots make clear that Shozaburo, too, may be killed. He assumes death is likely but accepts the possibility with relative calm, thinking that he has already had the experiences he wanted. In his cell he passes the hours whistling and recalling the women with whom he has been involved. Against expectation, he becomes one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave alive and return home. Watching Shanghai recede from the repatriation ship, he recognizes that survival has given him no explanation for life.

He reaches Japan in spring 1946, emaciated and without possessions. His parents died when their home was destroyed in the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 1945, and his brother disappeared on the Burmese front. Shozaburo is left alone, but the loss does not produce a pronounced display of grief. He registers an absence and accepts solitude as something that eventually comes to everyone. Survival, for him, means finding a way to continue.

Music and Postwar Life

Music supplies the means to do so. Since he knows no other work, Shozaburo gathers former companions and forms a small jazz band that plays at American military bases. There he befriends a jazz-loving American Army major, an Italian American from New Jersey who plays clarinet. The major can obtain records from the United States through his Quartermaster Corps position, and the two musicians spend their spare time playing together. Shozaburo listens to Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman, learning their musical phrases; the major also shares food, milk, and liquor, which are difficult to obtain in postwar Japan. Shozaburo takes this period as a welcome turn in his circumstances.

He marries in 1947, after unexpectedly meeting a distant cousin on his mother’s side. They talk over tea about relatives and the past, begin seeing one another, and soon live together. Tony later hears the family history from his father, but does not know how deeply Shozaburo loved his mother. Shozaburo describes her as pretty, quiet, and not very healthy. The account leaves the emotional character of the marriage uncertain rather than resolving it through Tony’s limited knowledge.

Shozaburo continues performing as musical styles change around him. Modern jazz, free jazz, and electric jazz arrive, but he keeps to the same older style. He is not a musician of the first rank, yet his name still draws audiences and he always finds work. His life is materially comfortable and personally satisfying by his own apparent measure: he has music, food, and companionship. Unlike Tony, he does not organize his life around accumulation or precise professional achievement.

Relationship with Tony and Lasting Significance

The difference between father and son is not simply a matter of temperament. Shozaburo’s life is outward-facing and improvised: he makes contacts, plays music, and adapts to each new circumstance without dwelling on the historical forces that shape it. Tony, by contrast, builds a fortune through exacting illustration and lives without close friends or a wish for children. Shozaburo’s ease offers no straightforward model for Tony, but their separate ways of living make the story’s contrast between sociability and isolation especially clear.

Two years after Tony’s wife dies, Shozaburo dies of liver cancer. His hospital stay is short, and he suffers little; his death is described as nearly like falling asleep, in keeping with the charmed quality the narration assigns to his life. He leaves little property beyond some cash and stock certificates. His instrument and vast collection of old jazz records are the substantial remainder of his musical existence.

Tony leaves the records boxed in the empty room associated with his wife’s belongings. Their musty smell requires him to open the windows regularly, although he otherwise avoids the room. After a year, the collection’s continued presence becomes oppressive enough to disturb his breathing and sleep. He sells it to a used-record dealer, receiving enough to buy a small car because many of the discs are valuable and out of print. The money means nothing to him. In this final consequence, Shozaburo’s music outlasts its maker as an object, but it cannot become comfort for Tony: the collection is at once the father’s legacy and a weight the son eventually relinquishes.