reach its own form of closure, through the kinds of repetition
that lyric is capable of, and when the three singers join in their
final chorus, lyric time has replaced book time in carrying
through to an ending. The singers disappear, the narrator is
left with no knowledge of what has transpired, and the dis-
placement of the book by the number has reached a triumphant
demonstration. Or is it a triumphant failure? The singers do
not deliver on their promise of a narrative, but they do deliver
the other order of time, the song. I suspect one reason Sond-
heim loves this number above his others is that it solves a kind
of puzzle: Can a number actually focus on a book scene that
remains unknown in the show? It can, and it does.^18
There is nothing overtly political about that number. It
lines up with the aesthetic questions we have been discussing.
Yet it also aims for political implications. Keep an eye on what
happens next. The Americans troop out of the hut, the narra-
tor pretends to get things wrong by announcing that these in-
vaders are departing never to return, and there appears alone
on the stage the one American who has not left, the frightful-
looking, lion-maned Admiral Perry himself, who ends act 1
with a ferocious combination of Kabuki dancing and Ameri-
can cakewalk. That no foreign foot has touched Japanese soil
is now disproved, and the proof is in this wordless dance.
Perry’s feet dance over the entire stage, the space that has
been Japan so far. The dance is grotesque and unsettling. The
Japanese and American elements are jumbled together in
sheer assertiveness, and there is no progression toward an out-
come beyond this sensationally danced confusion of cultures.
The political implication is there, but it is carried by the styles
of performance. That traditional Japanese culture has been
dislodged goes without saying. That traditional Japanese cul-
ture leaves distinct elements behind to be Americanized also
204 CHAPTER EIGHT
(^18) Sondheim’s own account of how the puzzle works out is strictly musical.
“It’s sixty bars of one chord. But the rhythm keeps changing, and the texture
keeps changing, and wherethe chord keeps getting placed just changes a little
bit at a time—maybe every four bars, or every eight bars....It’s minimalist
music. Nothing’s going on, but everything’s going on.” Quoted in Horowitz,
Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, p. 158.