Mr. Kangana

Mr. Kangana is a music teacher whose instruments and teaching connect the children’s performances to memories of his own past. He lends Bee Branch a shakuhachi from his collection and leads kindergarteners in a marimba performance at a parent gathering; when a mudslide destroys the sunroom, he remains to try to rescue the marimbas he brought from Nigeria as a young boy.

Music and Teaching

Mr. Kangana lends Bee a Japanese flute, the shakuhachi, from his personal collection. Bee plans to accompany first graders singing for World Celebration Day and has also devised an elephant dance for them. The exchange shows Mr. Kangana supporting a child’s musical and choreographic contribution with an instrument from his own collection.

At the parent gathering, he arrives with kindergarteners and their instruments. After Gwen Goodyear’s introduction, he leads them in a marimba performance, beginning with “My Giant Carp.” The children are absorbed in the music even as commotion breaks out outside, and after the first song they watch for his cue to begin the next.

The Mudslide

When mud bursts through the sunroom’s broken windows, the gathering becomes a scene of flight and wreckage. Mr. Kangana stays with the narrator, trying to rescue the marimbas rather than leave them behind. The instruments are not merely equipment for the performance: he had brought them with him when he emigrated from Nigeria as a boy, and their history makes the effort to save them an act of preserving something carried across a migration.

The mud stops when a vast, upside-down red billboard comes to rest against the opening and forms a dam. Mr. Kangana’s rescue attempt thus takes place amid the sudden destruction of the room where his students had just been playing, linking the performance’s fragile order to the disaster that interrupts it.

Narrative Role

Mr. Kangana appears through concrete acts of teaching, lending, leading, and attempting to protect the instruments. The novel gives little direct information about his life beyond the marimbas’ connection to his childhood in Nigeria, but that detail lends the instruments a personal history beyond their role in the school performance. His decision to stay with them during the mudslide makes that history visible at the moment the gathering’s familiar surroundings are swept away.