Episode 22 — To Love Sound

I believed I was a genius.

And in truth, I had been blessed with talent. Celebrated by everyone around me as a prodigy girl, I even had a television crew follow me for a local programme. Among children who played piano, there was no one who didn’t know the name Aihara Anon.

I was, just as my name Anon — loved sound — promised, loved by music.

My mother, a piano teacher, and my father, a music teacher, were both delighted by me as I swept award after award at competitions large and small. Their hopes and wishes for me were no burden at all. If anything, being looked to with such expectation made me happy. The name they had given me with a wish inside it — I could not have loved it more.

Because I loved music more than anyone. I had the confidence that no one could surpass me in that love. And in fact, my entire life was music — there was not one moment’s room to doubt that.

But love is not always rewarded. Even Beethoven was struck by deafness — betrayed by sound. How could I claim that such a moment would never come for me?

I had won every prize available domestically, and approached the overseas competition with everything prepared. At a prestigious international tournament with clear, unambiguous rankings, my name was inscribed at the very bottom of the results list. Last place.

What made it devastating was that I had not been off form that day. If anything, I had never been in better shape.

And from the moment my own talent — my own ceiling — was made so clearly, so visibly real: the sound I had loved so much began to slip through my fingers. However much I tried to scoop it back, it slipped through my palms like clear water.

Every time I sat at the piano, every time I entered a competition. Drowning in a sea of talent I could never make my own, close to suffocating.

It was in that state that I met Kanzaki Takuto. Not someone who loved sound, or was loved by it — but someone who was like music itself. An overwhelming talent. The violent, brutal force of a bloodline that had flowed unbroken for generations.

I thought it. I couldn’t help but think it. If he loved me, perhaps I too could become equal to that talent. If I became close to him — truly close — perhaps I could see the world he saw.

If only I could be loved by sound once more, I would pray to God or sell my soul to the devil. That was how cornered I was in those days.

And so I shared a bed with him. Whether it was because he loved me, or because he had taken a liking to my admittedly not-inconsiderable looks; whether it was nothing more than a physical outlet, a single night’s diversion — I don’t know. Only that he didn’t love my music, I believe. The man who took me was terribly rough, and there was no tenderness in it whatsoever. The delicate touch that pressed into the keys was nowhere to be found in the bed.

And even after that night with him, I was still, unchanged, myself. Not loved by sound. What I gained from the encounter was nothing but the pain of first experience.

That was how it should have been.

But persistent nausea, headaches, unexplained physical symptoms continued, and when I finally went to a doctor unable even to sit before the piano — I learned I was carrying a child.

In that instant, my career ended. One day without playing, and the sound escapes you. Three days to recover what one day’s rest has lost. After childbirth — never again. For someone whose talent was already inferior, music would not smile on me.

And however unwanted the pregnancy, ending the life growing inside me could not be permitted. To let the precious Kanzaki bloodline come to nothing. Such a desecration of music.

Indeed — somehow having heard the news — a servant of the Kanzaki household came to me. What was delivered: a signed marriage registration, the deed to a house on a prime plot of land. And a message.

“Unwanted pregnancy or not — having conceived, you are to provide an upbringing befitting a member of the Kanzaki family. Financial support for this will be provided without reservation”.

It was a curse. Retribution for having sold my soul to music. I, stripped of music, was obligated to raise a child for music’s sake.

And the reason he — Kanzaki Takuto — never appeared before the woman who had borne his child and become his wife: entirely because I lacked talent. Because I was not loved by sound. That was all there was to it.

In the depths of despair and helplessness, my life taken whole and denied — alone in that cavernous house he had given me — the child in my belly grew, as if laughing at me. As though drawing up through the umbilical cord all the remnants of what I had been.

I cannot count how many times I cursed the child in my womb. The root of all my misfortune. The price of the sin I had committed. The symbol of not being loved. And yet there was nothing I could do beyond cursing. The only thing I could do was stroke the belly that swelled with pitiless indifference.

And then, in the moment of giving birth — enduring alone a pain as if my body were being split in two —

There I met sound again. The first cry of a new life.

“A healthy girl”.

With those words, guided by the midwife, I held to my chest the life that was, unmistakably, connected to me.

She should have been the thing that stole my music. The symbol of the sin I carried. The curse. And yet — inexplicably, helplessly — I found her dear. Enough to bring tears without any intention. The crying that rang from inside my arms — I could not help but feel it was the most beautiful sound in the world.

And selfishly, I thought: I want to protect this child. I want to love this sound. So that this child — whose life was decided before she was born, who carries on her small body a fate far too heavy — could live happily regardless. So that she need not carry what I carried.

I stroked my beloved child’s head and murmured:

“Your name is Shion. So that sound will have an affinity with you — so that you, unlike me, will be a child loved by sound”.

With those words, I touched her small palm.

And softly — impossibly frail, pure white fingertips — wound around mine.

From those fingertips, I swore to protect everything that was this child.