The Forest of Wool and Steel Page 15

  I was embarrassed. I was about to start my third year as a tuner, yet was still noting down basic information like a rank amateur.

  ‘I think that’s fine,’ Mr Akino said blandly. ‘Sometimes I wish I’d been as diligent at taking notes as you. When you first start a job you see and hear all kinds of important things. If only I’d taken notes I might have made faster progress. It wasn’t so much that I disliked the time and effort required, but rather that I was operating under a misconception. I figured mastering technique meant learning it through your body.’ He stared at the closed notebook and added, ‘It’s an illusion. The idea that your ears will remember, your fingers will learn – it’s all an illusion. This is what remembers it all.’ Mr Akino pointed an index finger at his head.

  So it wasn’t just me. I’d also been sure that you learned technique physically, through your body. So much time passing and still being unable to master the essentials made me half give up, figuring I just didn’t have a musical physique. I continued to take notes, not wanting to waste any time gnashing my teeth.

  ‘You can’t just write it down, though,’ Mr Akino said. ‘You have to remember it. It’s like memorizing historical dates. At some point you’ll suddenly grasp the big picture.’

  Of course you can’t express everything about tuning in words. Not even one-hundredth, or one-thousandth of it. I know that, so I don’t rely on words alone. But the process of translating the techniques of tuning into words has allowed me to tether the music that would otherwise flow right on by, pinning my body to each and every technique I was trying to master.

  ‘So what’s with the big discussion?’ Mr Yanagi said as he cheerily swept into the room.

  ‘Nothing special. We were just talking about how terrible the weather is,’ Mr Akino said brusquely.

  ‘It really is terrible weather. A good rainstorm like this will completely mess up a tuning—Oh!’

  At this Oh, everyone turned to look at Mr Yanagi.

  ‘I – I have something to announce.’ Mr Yanagi lightly cleared his throat. ‘I’m, er – getting married soon.’

  ‘Really? For sure this time?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep, this time for sure.’ Mr Yanagi was beaming with joy. He’d been saying for ever that he was going to get married. Miss Hamano had kept delaying, saying she had some big work project she had to attend to. She apparently did translations – maybe the book she was working on was finally getting published.

  ‘Congrats.’

  ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  Mr Yanagi was all smiles, not even trying to hide his happiness.

  I don’t know if marriage is such a great thing or not, but it did feel good to see him looking this ecstatic. I didn’t think to add something like I wish you all the best, and ended up just gazing at him in silence.

  Bag of tuning tools in hand, I headed out on my way. The rain had let up, and the wind, which had been cold enough to sting my cheeks, had dropped. Patches of blue were appearing in the sky. Spring was just around the corner.

  Mr Yanagi was climbing out of his car. ‘Thought it was about time to put on regular tyres.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Oh, by the way, I meant to say: keep the second Sunday in May free.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We’re holding the reception at a restaurant after the wedding ceremony that day.’

  ‘Lovely! I’ve never been to a wedding before.’

  ‘I guess you’re too young to have had many friends you know get married yet.’

  I couldn’t think of anybody, even a few years down the road, who would be likely to invite me to a wedding reception. Maybe my younger brother.

  ‘One other thing – do you have a minute?’

  I nodded and placed my heavy bag on the ground. I’d started out early so I still had plenty of time.

  ‘I was thinking of having some entertainment at the party.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I was going to invite my band, but punk rock and a wedding reception aren’t exactly a good fit, so we’re going to have a piano instead.’

  ‘That’s a great idea!’

  ‘I found a couple of restaurants with pianos. A restaurant with a nice instrument but so-so food, or one with fantastic food but only a so-so piano – which would you choose?’

  ‘The one with the good piano.’

  ‘I agree!’ Mr Yanagi looked down at his bag of tuning tools. ‘But she wanted to go for the one that has the best food.’

  ‘Ah.’

  That was a little surprising. I would have thought Miss Hamano would go with the piano.

  ‘The food I can leave up to others, but she told me, “The piano you should be able to take care of, Yanagi.”’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No reallys about it. The groom is very busy on his special day. If I weren’t the groom I’d do my best with the piano, but I’m going to have my hands full. So I was thinking …’ Mr Yanagi held my eyes. ‘I asked a very good pianist to play for us.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  ‘Work-related guests with a good ear for music will be coming. But whether or not the guests have a good enough ear, or have even heard a decent pianist, listening to a wonderful recital while dining is a perfect way to celebrate.’

  He looked so happy it made me happy too.

  ‘I was thinking of having you tune the piano, Tomura.’

  This came so out of the blue, my voice shot up an octave:

  ‘But – th–there must be someone else you could—?’

  Mr Akino would be good, and naturally Mr Itadori would be superb.

  ‘I’d like you to do it, if you’re OK with that?’

  For a moment I questioned whether I should accept, me being a junior tuner and all. This was a very special day for them. It would be better to have someone more skilled than me to do the tuning.

  ‘The pianist is going to be Kazune-chan.’

  ‘Wha—?’

  I was astonished. What a wonderful party that would be – to dine while listening to Kazune play the piano.

  ‘You’d like to do the tuning now, I bet.’ Mr Yanagi grinned.

  ‘No—I think—’

  All the more reason to have someone better than me do the tuning, I was about to say, when an emotion I couldn’t suppress welled up in me.

  ‘I can do it,’ I announced, in a voice so decisive it took me by surprise. ‘Please let me do it.’

  I bowed my head, and Mr Yanagi nodded in delight.

  V

  A Master Class

  Greatness = Perseverance + Resignation

  That evening when I got back to the office there was a message taped to my desk.

  Tomorrow’s appointment with Mr Kimura is cancelled.

  Cancelled? I had a bad feeling about this. I went over to check the details with Miss Kitagawa, who’d taken the call. ‘He’s not rescheduling for later, but cancelling altogether?’

  Miss Kitagawa shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  ‘Another one who wants to change tuners?’

  ‘Umm,’ she said, avoiding my eyes.

  ‘Did he not want us to handle his tuning in the future at all?’

  ‘No, he didn’t go that far.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, and bowed my head. I sensed all eyes in the office on me.

  ‘There’s no need for you to apologize, Tomura-kun. It’s not like he said he’s changing companies because he doesn’t like you. It’s possible he simply isn’t playing the piano any more.’

  If that was the case, he would have said so.

  ‘At any rate, it’s not your fault. Times are tough all round. There aren’t that many families who play the piano as a hobby and have the extra cash to get them tuned regularly every year.’

  She managed to make it sound as if it wasn’t my fault at all. But that couldn’t be. If he’d been pleased with my tuning, I’m sure he wouldn’t have cancelled.

  Return
ing to my desk, I was careful not to let my feelings show, but was unable to hold back an enormous sigh. Am I really that bad? I happened to glance up and saw Mr Akino look away quickly.

  ‘What do you think is the single most important thing for a tuner?’ I ventured to ask.

  Mr Akino, still not looking at me, said, ‘A good tuning hammer.’

  ‘No, that isn’t what I meant,’ I said, pressing him, when a voice from the other side of the office chipped in, ‘Perseverance.’

  This came from Mr Yanagi. ‘And courage, too.’

  ‘Plus resignation,’ Mr Akino muttered.

  All kinds of responses were flying at me. They didn’t say anything about talent or ability, and for that, with the way I was feeling now, I felt incredibly grateful.

  ‘Perseverance I suppose I can understand,’ Miss Kitagawa said with a wry laugh.

  I could understand courage, too. You can completely change the nature of a piano with your ministrations – without courage you could never take on that responsibility. ‘Then what about resignation?’ All eyes turned to Mr Akino.

  ‘Come on, guys, I think you’re misunderstanding me.’ Mr Akino pulled a long face. ‘No matter what you do,’ he said, ‘you’ll never reach perfection. At a certain point you have to come to a decision, say this is it, put your tools down and give up.’

  ‘And if you don’t, then what?’ Mr Yanagi asked the question that was already on my lips.

  ‘If you can never decide when to call it quits, then at some point you go mad,’ Mr Akino said lightly.

  I wondered if the silence in the room meant they all agreed. Pursue perfection, refuse to give up and you’re on the route to insanity. Had I ever been in danger of that myself, even for a moment?

  ‘Didn’t we talk about this once before?’ Mr Yanagi asked.

  ‘Well, we talked about why Tomura might have clients cancel on him or ask to change tuners,’ Mr Akino said.

  ‘I don’t think that Tomura’s made any major slip-ups. I remember bringing up the idea about the ten thousand hours,’ Miss Kitagawa said.

  ‘No one really accepts that notion,’ Mr Akino said.

  Ah, so that’s it. The theory that people had no faith in me because I was young and inexperienced was simply offered as a consolation.

  ‘People who can do the work manage it even if they haven’t put in ten thousand hours. And those who can’t, can’t, even with countless hours under their belt.’

  Mr Yanagi gazed up at the ceiling. ‘That’s a pretty blunt way of putting it.’

  ‘Everybody knows it, they just don’t say it. So it’s not worth thinking about ability or aptitude because it won’t get you anywhere if you do.’

  A pause, then Mr Akino added, ‘You just do the work.’

  That sent a chill up my spine. Was that true of Mr Akino too?

  ‘You can live without talent. But in our hearts we still believe that something we can’t quite grasp even after ten thousand hours will somehow, maybe, all fall into place after twenty thousand. Isn’t it more important to build up a higher, broader view than to try to see things too simplistically?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my voice hoarse. I didn’t want to agree so readily. I wasn’t sure if I really got it, but I did think that what he said was, for the most part, true. We’re not here and surviving because we have talent. Whether you have it or not, you keep on living. And I didn’t want to agonize over whether I had it or not. The only option was to do the work and discover with my own hands something substantial, something meaningful.

  ‘Hi, everyone, I’m back,’ rang a reassuring voice from the door. Mr Itadori was just coming back into the office.

  Before I could say anything, Mr Yanagi asked, ‘Mr Itadori, what do you consider to be the single most important asset for a tuner?’

  As he placed his tuning bag on the floor, he replied, in his gentle voice, ‘That would be the clients.’

  I recalled the sublime tone Mr Itadori had created in the concert hall to support the performance of the top-flight pianist. Yet without a doubt it was the pianist himself – Mr Itadori’s client, in other words – who had succeeded in drawing that sound from the piano, with Mr Itadori’s assistance.

  And what about me? I wondered. My clients’ faces came to me. A smiling, nodding face; a sullen, unhappy one. Even the faces of those clients whose names I couldn’t recall immediately rose up in my mind’s eye, one after the other. It was true: the ones who had trained me were – no doubt about it – my clients. Kazune’s solemn face now appeared to me, but as soon as it did I saw her break into a smile.

  A True Master Is Forever a Pupil

  The day before the wedding I arrived to tune the piano at the restaurant where the reception was to be held. The ambience of the place was warm and inviting, with the grand piano installed in one corner of the attractive dining area.

  It was a finer class of piano than I’d been expecting, since Mr Yanagi had told me they’d prioritized food over the quality of the instrument. Keeping my excitement in check, I opened up the fallboard – only for my heart to plummet to my boots the moment I laid eyes on the keyboard. A closer inspection was enough to confirm my worst fears. The height of the keys was misaligned by about 0.5 mm, some higher, some lower. I tapped on a few notes and found my misgivings were justified. The sound was all over the place.

  I pictured Kazune playing it. Seated at this piano in her sixth-form-college uniform, she would do her level best – although would she even be wearing her uniform to a wedding reception? Probably not, yet I couldn’t imagine her wearing anything else. I pictured her playing, her posture erect, delicately running her fingers up and down the keyboard. And the sounds she would create flowed like water from a cool, clear spring into my ears.

  I struck a few more notes on the piano in front of me. No, this was in no way fit for Kazune – I didn’t want to make her play this as it was. So keeping her constantly in mind, I set about tuning the instrument.

  I lifted and propped open the lid. It still moves me every single time I see the tuning pins all neatly arranged inside, like so many trees in the forest. The soundboard made of spruce sends pulses of vibration racing out at thousands of metres per second. This was where I would help create Kazune’s sound. This was where I would neatly part the undergrowth to make it easier for her to enter the forest.

  I started by adjusting the keys so that they were uniform in height. The cushion connecting each one to the keyboard had completely worn out on the inside. Here I inserted very thin slivers of paper to adjust the height. The normal movable range of a key, depressing it from its full height to the base, is only some 10 mm, so a difference of even 0.5 mm would make it awfully hard to play. After equalizing the height I turned my attention to the depth, and I pressed each note in turn, checking the position where it struck the strings.

  Only then did I begin the actual tuning process. I’d discussed this in advance with Mr Yanagi, who had told me to close my eyes when I decided on the sound I wanted. I didn’t think this was just another metaphor. I closed my eyes, listened intently, fixed the idea in my mind of each sound that welled up, and adjusted each tuning pin accordingly.

  I worked outside the regular flow of time and space, my senses on full alert, my concentration unwavering. Once I had finished, I realized that nearly four hours had gone by. The piano was much improved now, I thought.

  Kazune’s rehearsal was set for early on the morning of the reception so that in the event of a problem, I’d have enough time to put it right.

  ‘I’m so happy, because I wanted to get used to playing this piano as soon as I could,’ Kazune said. ‘The piano at home, the one at school, pianos at performances and competitions – each and every one has its own personality.’ She said this while pulling her sheet music from a bag.

  Yuni nodded beside her. ‘I always found our piano at home the easiest one to play,’ she said. ‘But when I played a concert grand in an auditorium for the first time, I was just blown away.’


  That just had to be a piano tuned by Mr Itadori, I was sure of it.

  ‘Well, it had a great sound and was surprisingly easy to play. But you never had a problem playing anywhere, Yuni.’

  Yuni smiled at Kazune’s words. ‘It only seemed like that. That’s what you saw because that’s what you wanted to see.’

  Kazune looked surprised, so Yuni pressed on. ‘You thought I was able to do things that didn’t come so easily to you, right?’

  Before Kazune could reply, Yuni sat down at the piano and opened the fallboard, straight away sounding some notes out on the keyboard.

  I’ll probably never forget that moment with the twins. Instinctively, it seemed, they looked each other in the eyes in perfect symmetry.

  ‘It sounds great!’ Yuni turned around, her eyes sparkling.

  Thank God. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was nervous about Yuni, who could no longer play, sitting at the piano and striking the keys. My heart was in my mouth whenever I was in her company.

  Kazune nodded. ‘Yes, it does. It’s perfect.’ She too was smiling.

  At this moment, I couldn’t tell the difference between them.

  ‘Kazune, the thing is’ – Yuni’s voice was cheerful – ‘you can play fantastically well wherever you are.’

  Yuni stood up and the two girls now exchanged places without fuss. Kazune spread out her sheet music on the stand and sat down. Just as Yuni had done, she struck a key with her finger. This must have been the standard A above middle C, but I could immediately picture scenery opening out before me, with a path extending through a crisp, silvery forest. A young deer seemed to frolic in a hidden glade.

  Yuni gazed up at me, her face beaming. ‘It sounds like the splashing of clear water.’

  I was struck by how the same sound could conjure up entirely different images, depending on the person listening.

  ‘I used this particular sound as the foundation for the entire tone and colour,’ I explained, and Kazune nodded again.