Character Analysis
Mild-mannered electronics firm CEO by day, super opera fan by night! Okay, so a passionate devotion to opera may not count as a superpower. But if it did, Mr. Hosokawa would be up there with Batman and Superman. Operaman? We'll work on it.
Aside from rockin' out to opera (or whatever you do with that kind of music), he has a family and a day job as CEO at the largest electronics firm in Japan, Nansei. He's a dutiful husband and father (though not a deeply involved one) and he's seriously hardworking and successful as a businessman. But in case you didn't get it yet, opera makes him come alive in a way that nothing else does.
Plot and Symbolism Catalyst. And a Cool Dude, Too.
Mr. Hosokawa does some pretty big things related to the plot and symbolism of Bel Canto. First and foremost, it's thanks to his birthday the whole thing takes off with a running start. Just by agreeing to come from Japan to hear Roxane Coss sing at a birthday party somewhere in South America, he unknowingly gets the story going. Pretty important, no?
But Mr. Hosokawa isn't just important at the beginning of the story. He's also the only person who brought a translator along, which makes him the indirect reason that the international cast of characters can communicate with each other the whole way through the book.
And if that weren't enough, he's also the one who invited the businessman and secret pianist Kato along. Kato steps in as Roxane's accompanist, making all that beautiful opera that's so important in Bel Canto a lot easier to do.
Finally, Mr. Hosokawa has an important tragic role at the end of the book. He's the one hostage who dies when government forces invade and kill all the terrorists. In a way, his death (along with Carmen's) closes the plot. His death is also symbolically important because it underlines a few central ideas in the novel. It emphasizes the way that the terrorists and the hostages are becoming a community, because he dies protecting Carmen (10.123). (Did we mention Mr. H is also a seriously great guy, even if he's super modest about it?)
Mr. Hosokawa's role in the ending also underlines the idea that maybe the astonishing world created by trauma and art in the house can't be sustained long-term. Mr. Hosokawa and Carmen are the two characters who most fully embody the strange and marvelous things that are possible in that dream world, but impossible outside of it.
They both fall in love with people whom they might not have ever met in their ordinary lives, and whom the outside world would see as unsuitable matches. Neither of them survive to find out what it would be like to try to build up a "normal" life outside of the hostage house, but it's pretty clear it would be tough.
After all, Mr. Hosokawa's society expects him to:
- Stay married to his wife, who dutifully does everything the wife of the largest Japanese electronics firm's CEO is expected to do in the world of the book (see 6.20 for a description of their honorable and successful but not very passionate match).
- Keep being a successful CEO (6.19 fills us in on some of his hard work and business successes).
It definitely doesn't expect him to:
- Get a divorce.
- Ditch his company.
- Follow Roxane's performing career around the world.
And Mr. Hosokawa knows it. Even though he wants to do that, he also realizes the real world is different from the dream world inside the house (see 10.7 and our character analysis for Roxane).
Which makes it all the sadder and more symbolically powerful when Mr. Hosokawa dies at the very moment the real world intrudes on the dream world. Maybe there's just no way for him to transition back to his old life, and maybe there's just no way for him to continue the new life in the real world either. Perhaps the book is saying that Mr. Hosokawa is spot-on when he realizes he now has a life of his own for the first time ever, a private life (10.6). Perhaps it's also saying that he's all too right when he thinks: "Maybe the private life wasn't forever" (10.8).
In most of the plot events, Mr. Hosokawa is passive but necessary. Stuff wouldn't roll merrily along without him, but he also doesn't take a very active role in bringing changes about. His role in the plot is that of a catalyst: the plot needs him to be there, but not to do so much.
Gee, is there some connection between that realization and the fact that he primarily defines himself as an audience rather than an artist? Looks like a symbolism thing to us.
Which brings us to our other point. Mr. Hosokawa is—ta da!—a fantastic appreciator of art. Which turns out to be pretty important in a book that's all about what art can do.
Great Appreciator of Art
Mr. Hosokawa has a fantastic Opera Appreciation resume. He first fell in love with opera on his eleventh birthday, when his father took him to see Verdi's Rigoletto as a present (Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift weren't wowing the preteen crowds when he was a kid, apparently).
It must have been a great performance (more on Rigoletto later), because Mr. Hosokawa has loved opera ever since. That's a pretty cultured eleven-year-old. And grown-up, too: when business magazines do profiles on him, opera is the thing they write about to show you can be a super successful business leader and still have a hobby (1.14). Cute, huh? He's completely obsessed, and it seems that he's even flown around the world to different cities to hear opera performances (1.13).
On that note, Roxane Coss is his favorite singer. But he still keeps a respectful distance. He's not about to shove his way to the front of the autograph line or hold up a sign that says "<3." Actually, it hasn't even occurred to him to try to get to know Roxane as a person. He just likes being a member of the audience, and he assumes anyone who isn't insane would feel the same way about her voice (1.13). It's kind of charming. We promise.
Opera is pretty much the core of Mr. Hosokawa's identity, even if he's all CEO on the surface. For instance, the narrator tells us this about him: "Many years later, when everything was business, when he worked harder than anyone in a country whose values are structured on hard work, he believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music" (1.9). That's a strong statement, but the narrator gives us even more a little later:
The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love. Not his wife, his daughters, or his work. He never thought that he had somehow transferred what should have filled his daily life into opera. Instead he knew that without opera, this part of himself would have vanished altogether. (1.9)
Yep, like we said, opera is the core of his identity. That doesn't mean Mr. Hosokawa is a bad husband or father (though he's not the most involved one) or an unsuccessful businessman. But it does mean that opera is really central to who he is.
It's maybe not the biggest surprise, then, when he falls for Roxane Coss. The narrator tells us this: "Happiness, if he was right to use that word, was something that until now he had only experienced in music. He was still experiencing it in music. The difference was that now the music was a person" (6.23). Mr. Hosokawa loves other things about Roxane, too (6.23 goes on to list some of them), but their romance begins in a shared love of music, and that remains at its core.
How does all this work in the novel as a whole? Mr. Hosokawa is one of the characters who helps Bel Canto explore the theme of art from the audience's perspective. He shows us that audiences as well as artists can be passionate about art, and that art can change your life even if you're experiencing it rather than making it.
What is Love? Baby, Don't Hurt Me.
Like we said, it's probably not a huge surprise when, stuck in a house with his favorite opera singer for months, Mr. Hosokawa falls for her as well as the music. The fact that he does also lets Bel Canto explore one of its other great themes. You guessed it: love. Roxane and Mr. Hosokawa have a shared love for something that's deeply defining for both of them. And then love for each other, too.
However, like the love plots in a lot of operas, theirs is passionate and transformative, but not exactly successful—as in, one-half-of-the-pair-dies-tragically-by-horrendous-violence not successful. It's the kind of thing that happens all the time in opera, but it looks pretty gruesome in real life. (Or you know, Ann Patchett's version of real life. It's still closer than opera.)
On the other hand, Bel Canto just might be saying that, for certain folks, it's better to die for love than to live without it. That would also be something a lot of characters in opera believe. Bel Canto isn't going to give you an answer to that question, but it's definitely asking it. It's up to the reader to decide whether Mr. Hosokawa would have been better off safe at home, never having fallen passionately in love for Roxane, or falling hard and then tragically dying. Can't get much more catch-22 than that.
Either way, what Mr. Hosokawa thinks about Rigoletto in the beginning of the book seems to be what happens to him by the end:
Tiny people, insects, really, slipped out from behind the curtains, opened their mouths, and with their voices gilded the walls with their yearning, their grief, their boundless, reckless love that would lead each one to separate ruin. (1.8)
In other words, he finds yearning, grief, and reckless love in the dream world created by opera in Bel Canto. It leads him to what many would call ruin. But the book leaves open the possibility that for him, it was all worth it.
Mr. Hosokawa's Timeline