Episode 17 — A World Without Sound

By the time I was old enough to understand anything, the world around me was already full of sound.

Classical music played constantly in the living room — always lively, or sorrowful, or solemn. It had probably been that way since I was still inside Mum’s stomach, so if prenatal education has any effect at all, I had received its benefits to the fullest possible degree.

And it wasn’t just the music playing endlessly in the living room.

In the basement of our three-storey house — a soundproofed room, like a secret chamber — there were violins, flutes, trumpets. And a large grand piano. Most of my earliest memories are of the grey concrete walls of that music room. There was not one thing missing from our home, as far as music was concerned.

Which meant, in reverse, that nothing outside of music was permitted to me.

“Look, Mum — I drew you.”

I brought her a sheet of drawing paper covered in crayon.

“Never mind that. Go and practise the piano.”

The crayons were taken from me after that one use. I never saw them again. After that, I never once drew a picture at home.

I didn’t know picture books existed until I saw them on a school bookshelf in primary school. I didn’t know stories existed. Everything I had ever read up to that point was sheet music.

Yes — every day, staring down sheet music. Not one memory that wasn’t the piano. Not a single day went by without my mother’s scolding.

Well — there was one day. When I was small, I reached the point where I couldn’t stand any of it, and I ran away from home. Where I went, what I did, what I thought in that world without sound — I don’t remember any of it.

The one thing I do remember is being found by Mum, and being struck hard across the cheek. And what she said to me through her tears:

“Do you have any idea how many days it takes to recover from even one day off? Do you know how many performers have lost their sound after just a small break? Do you know how frightening and painful it is to carry the Kanzaki name and fear being abandoned by sound? Listen to me. Your name — Shion — is Mum’s prayer. Mum’s wish. A wish that sound will always have an affinity with you”.

And then she held me close. Her warmth, the cloying sweetness of her perfume. The words that clung and clung. Her wish — to me, it felt like a curse.

Before I had the chance to love anything. Before I had the chance to choose. By the time I noticed, my life was already running along a single track, with cliffs at either end. One step off the path and it was a straight drop to the bottom.

Primary school came, and nothing changed. If anything, Mum’s direction grew harsher.

“Because school takes up your day, you can’t practise all day the way you used to — so you’ll need to work twice as hard to make up for it”.

My father was a conductor, pursued by orchestras and competitions all over the world, and he never came home — so in my world, Mum was everything. Her words became the track my life ran on. Whether Mum was pleased, whether Mum was satisfied — that was my entire system of value.

Thanks in part to Mum’s devoted guidance, I never lost a domestic competition. Abroad, results varied — but simply being invited was apparently an honour in itself, and Mum was always in high spirits regardless of outcome, so the results didn’t really matter.

That must have been when it started — being written up in television programmes, magazines, newspapers, under the catch phrase child prodigy. Mum was usually strict to the point of severity, but she responded to that kind of exposure with surprising straightforwardness, watching recordings of morning information programmes over and over, her expression softening — and those might have been the only moments my heart ever truly rested.

Everything else: a constant sense of tautness, a bowstring never allowed to go slack. At school, kept at arm’s length as the famous prodigy. At home, playing piano continuously under a barrage of scolding and shouting and criticism. On television, only my beautiful surface cut out and consumed as entertainment by strangers I’d never spoken to.

This can’t go on. There was some part of me, oddly calm, watching from a distance and knowing it. Sooner or later, something will snap.

And a little after I started middle school, the signs appeared.

Waking suddenly from shallow sleep, for no reason, tears overflowing and refusing to stop. The world containing only me, no one able to find me, not even Mum truly loving me — the loneliness I normally kept locked away turning all at once, baring its teeth, tightening my chest until breathing was difficult and my heart felt about to split open.

There was no way to escape it except to wait for exhaustion to bring sleep again. All I could do was pray that the warm, wet sensation trailing down my cheeks would be swallowed by drowsiness.

And the morning that finally came. Even seeing my swollen, red-rimmed eyelids, my bloodshot eyes — Mum said nothing.

Nights and dawns like that, repeated over and over, over and over.

Then one day — one of those usual tear-soaked nights — aimlessly turning over the phone I’d been given for location-tracking purposes, on the grounds that it was safe. The phone with its filters, where I couldn’t even watch videos properly. Searching for something, anything, that might give my heart even a small rest — I tapped an advertisement by accident. And for some reason it bypassed the search filter that normally caught everything. And where I arrived was a novel-posting site.

It took no time at all for me to become absorbed. Novels were full of the thoughts of countless people, and while I was immersed in a story’s world I didn’t feel alone. I could forget the loneliness.

And text had no sound. The entirely flat world gave peace to someone imprisoned by sound.

How much of a salvation that was. Which is why, when I properly made an account, I chose that name…

And then I found one particular novel. A story about a hardworking protagonist and a heroine called a genius, stumbling through setbacks and anguish but still finding joy in music, in piano, still growing. The bright and glittering story of the path I had wanted to walk and never could.

That novel’s title was: I Dedicate This Final Note to You.