Disclaimer: Not mine
an utterance of noise
Hayato has been told many times again that he has a brilliant mind. He is not of pedigree birth, nor even of respectable money, so this surprises not a few of his childhood tutors when they come to realize it. What they do not realize is that what Hayato knows carries from between his jaded gray eyes and merges into a point of singular comprehension and truth: all things are the same and none of them matter. Numbers and patterns, the grinding beat of man's reason; music, the voiceless cry of the heavens – the language of intangibles can have no master over him. Neither, then, can the language of man: and in this he excels.
He is the half-blood son of a high ranked mafioso, and this means two things. One, that he is Italian, and that he has thought nothing of his acquirement of the requisite European languages: a fluency in French, a smattering of German, an intense dislike of English. Two, that he is not Italian – that he is of another blood he can see but entirely, smeared in reminders beneath his skin; two – that in the dim light of dreams before waking, his vowels become staccato, and his smooth consonants barbare and his murmurings the incomprehensible repetitions of nihongo on gaijin breath.
Hayato speaks Japanese with the measure and pause of someone who has forgotten his mother tongue and only later realized the loss; as if his own mouth has swollen and will not catch around this burst of malformed vibration.
In this he hesitates. In this he knows not the meter of classics, penned and papered by long dead, well-aggrandized masters. In this he has never sat between his father and sister, assaulted by a fluid transference of conversation. In this Hayato has heard no voices, save in the remnants of his own curling "R"s and half-remembered utterances; the childhood lilt of a woman whose name and face he has lost to the annals of carelessness, and in his name.
What he has now is but this name she has given him, this ghost of a woman who must find discontent with her own torments to curse him yet with a constant and daily reminder that his roots lie elsewhere than the soil upon which his feet tread today. A constant and daily reminder that this is in one thing he cannot achieve: of all the secrets he keeps but of which he cannot speak, the secret to the perfect punctuated tap of his name is the one that haunts him most.
Hayato's memory is an astounding one, his tutors have frequently commented, and Hayato begs to disagree. His memory is worthless, and if it is to be worth anything at all, it would allow him to recollect the words to the childish melodies, misted images – broken incantations of an imperfect mind.