Dear tweeterfolk,

The following excerpt is from the Feb. 6 issue of the New Yorker and
though it does contain bird-related material, I confess this is not my primary
motivation for posting it.

Kenzaburo Oe received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994 and the New
Yorker recently did a profile of him. In the profile we learn that his
son was born severely brain damaged, something Oe has written about in
his fiction. What follows is a true account of how Oe and his wife first
began to communicate with his son, Hikari.

"At first, Hikari was completely negative about communicating with me or
with my wife. It was as if he were trapped inside his body. But we were
always trying to reach him. When Hikari was four years old, we bought a
recording of various birdsongs and played it over and over again. There
would be a bird singing and then an announcer's very neutral voice saying
"This is a pigeon" or "This is a water rail," "This is a blue jay." This
went on for more than two years. We played it for him all the time. One
day when Hikari was about six years old, we went to our cottage in the
mountains. I was walking in the woods with him on my shoulders, and I
heard a bird chirping. I didn't know what kind of bird it was. Then I
heard a voice saying--in Japanese, of course--"This is a water rail." I
thought I was hallucinating. There were no other people around. It was
like a phantom. Then came another chirp and, again, "This is a water
rail." It was Hikari! And he was right! So it seemed clear then that
he was capable of learning. It turned out that whan we played the
recording he could identify *all* the birds: "This is a pigeon." "This
is a blackbird," and so on. He knew the sounds of seventy birds. A kind
of genius. And so my wife and I began to talk to him, at first, through
the names of birds."

"Then my wife began to play recordings of Bach, Mozart, and others around
the house--mostly for herself. But it became clear that even if we just
played a snippet of one of the pieces--a Brandenburg Concerto,
say--Hikari could identify it. His speaking has never really developed
that much, but even though he cannot mature in speech--in language--his
music always develops. Our doctor tells us that the brain is divided
into two hemispheres, and the one side takes on the role of speech and
the other the role of music. He says that in Hikari's brain the halves
are divided, with only the weakest connection between them. His musical
side is the strong side."

Hikari is now 31 years old and, though he rarely speaks, he has composed
some remarkable music for flute and piano. Two of his compositions are
available on compact disc.

Tom Cotner
Department of Pediatrics
University of Washington
tcotner at u.washington.edu
(206) 543-6755

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"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what
we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught."
-- Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist
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