Episode 18 — Refrain

The moment I saw that child on the television — on a morning variety programme — the vague, hazy world came into sharp focus. Fingers moving like a dance. A refined, polished appearance where childlike innocence and beauty coexisted. My heart was seized in an instant, my eyes riveted. A word I didn’t know I knew rang through my mind: destiny.

I turned to my mother without thinking.

“I want to play piano.”

My mother turned slowly, wearing the exhausted expression of someone just home from work, and told me:

“A piano might be a little difficult for us, I’m afraid.”

In our small apartment room, those words fell quietly.

◇◇◇

The sound of rain woke me. Layered over the sounds from my dream, the slow, drowsy voice of a middle-aged teacher struck my eardrums.

Perhaps because the lesson was classical literature — I’d dreamed something from a long time ago. The thing that drives me to write: that longing I felt then, and the complex that grew from it never being within reach from the start. The helplessness of never even reaching the starting line.

None of it is purely positive — and yet it led to my meeting with Kanzaki-san. If I hadn’t been writing fiction, I wouldn’t have been drawn to her so strongly. That alone makes me feel as though even the early setbacks and complexes have somehow been redeemed. And at the same time, knowing that it was through those small accumulated choices that I came to meet her — I feel the strange wonder of how connections are made.

Although that connection might, right now, be on the verge of breaking.

Three days since that afternoon. Kanzaki-san had not appeared in the music room once. Whether that was her own choice or whether her mother was involved — I didn’t know.

But something told me it was the latter. That feeling was mixed up with wanting it to be so.

The instant I saw Kanzaki-san’s mother — the instant I saw that her first concern was not that her child had come home late, but whether her fingers were injured — something of what surrounds Kanzaki-san came into view. Why she thinks of her own name as a curse. Why she had tried to quit piano that day. It felt as though a single thread had been drawn through all those mysteries, connecting them.

I couldn’t understand everything that Kanzaki-san carries. And yet part of me had already arrived at an understanding, had found a kind of clarity and comfort in it — that shallow, presumptuous part of me.

And that shallowness brought something else back to me, belatedly — something I had said, something reckless and entirely self-centred:

“Play piano for me. Keep playing — for me”.

Could those words have been a curse too? Could they have become another shackle binding Kanzaki-san to music? Was I, at heart, doing exactly the same thing as her mother?

Thoughts turning against myself like that. And alongside them, desperately assembling the counter-arguments.

But then — if that were true. Why did she come to the music room every day, faithfully following those words of mine? Why did she play piano with something that looked like joy? Had I only been flattering myself when I felt that Kanzaki-san, like me, thought of that time in the music room as something special?

Things I knew, things I didn’t know. Lined up desperately inside my head. No answer arrived.

Rain tapped at the window. The rainy season had arrived at the same time as Kanzaki-san stopped coming — as if in her place — and it seemed to speak for the state of my heart. What a clichéd, cheap way to put it, I thought, and laughed at myself.

And then, noticing that I was connecting everything to Kanzaki-san without meaning to — I realised there was one more thing I knew. One more certainty.

I want to see Kanzaki-san. That was the largest feeling inside me right now.

◇◇◇

Evening in the apartment. Mum was out at work. The kind of loneliness that arrives on schedule, an ordinary part of life.

Sitting before the desktop computer that Mum and I share — which I’ve largely taken over — I was striking the keyboard with single-minded focus.

I want to see Kanzaki-san. That alone was driving me, recalling the music room, Kanzaki-san’s figure, as I put words together.

But the words couldn’t fill the hollow in my chest. However far I went, language had no substance — it was only a substitute. If anything, the wanting only grew.

All of that wanting, all of it, loaded into these inadequate words — today again I finished a chapter and uploaded it through the usual process to the posting site.

And before long, the red light bloomed, signalling a notification. The first to comment, as always, was Otonashi-san.

“Shiko-sensei’s novel is the reason I’m able to keep going”.