Episode 5 — About You
Again today, I’m watching Kanzaki-san’s sound. Burning it in behind my retinas, scorching the film. The days in the music room accumulate without break, like a film projected onto a screen, and all the while I keep transcribing — Kanzaki-san’s tone, Kanzaki-san’s beauty — into the novel.
What I know about Kanzaki-san.
1. She is extraordinarily good at piano.
To be honest, I’ve only ever admired it from a distance; I don’t know the first thing about what separates good playing from great. Even so, the fingers dancing lightly across the keys, the melodies flowing one into the next — there’s something unmistakably beyond the ordinary in it, and that much reaches me clearly. I’ve been watching videos of professional performances for reference when I write, and even to my untrained ear, I can’t say with any confidence which is the finer playing. I’m truly glad Kanzaki-san didn’t quit. Come to think of it, the reason she wanted to quit in the first place — and the reason she changed her mind — are both still a mystery. Will we ever reach the point where I can ask about something that personal? Whether it’s even right to fold that kind of inner life into the novel — that was something I’d need to think carefully about.
2. Her face is genuinely, impossibly beautiful.
I think it should be against some kind of rule — to play piano like that and look like that. Pale and translucent, so fragile she seems about to dissolve, large violet-indigo eyes beneath double-folded lids, long lashes. The occasional glimpse of something melancholy surfacing through the blankness of her expression. Even as a fictional character she would be too much — and yet here she is, in reality, right before me, conjuring melodies of startling vividness. Of course I want to write about her. And yet — what would happen if Kanzaki-san, say, won a major competition and had to leave this place? What would I do then? Would there still be any reason to write? I’ve never before let someone else become the thing I anchor my own intentions to. The fact that one person could so easily change everything about me — that’s how beautiful Kanzaki-san is. A beauty I want to seal inside words forever.
3. She seems to genuinely love piano, whatever she might say.
The fierce, almost frightening playing of that very first day — where has it gone? Lately, Kanzaki-san seems to play with something more alive in her. Her face is still mostly expressionless, of course, so it’s hard to read emotion there directly — but in the small movements, the way she carries herself, I catch something fresh and clear, something that feels like joy. Almost as though she’s performing for me to see. Is that too self-absorbed? Probably. And the watch me, listen to my sound line was almost certainly just teasing. Even so — if my being there has brought something forward-looking into her, some small brightness, I hope it has. Caring about where you exist inside another person — I’ve never done that before. Knowing Kanzaki-san, just that alone, has expanded the world to something infinite. And as a side effect — not much of a side effect, given how heavy it is — colour has been added. The world has colour now. If only the novel could carry that too, I think. If only words could be coloured. Kanzaki-san is too beautiful; letters alone can’t come close to saying all of her. Every day I feel more sharply the inadequacy, the limitations, of words as a medium.
And today again, the final note arrives before I’ve managed to capture everything that Kanzaki-san is. She lifts her fingers slowly from the keys, steps back from the piano, crosses toward me with a light, easy step. Then, wearing her usual blank expression, that unguarded beauty, she tilts her head and looks up at me.
“How was today’s piano?”
The glow of those violet-indigo eyes right before me. Close enough to see myself reflected in them.
What I know about Kanzaki-san.
4. She stands disconcertingly close.
For some reason, in everything, Kanzaki-san had no sense of distance. I’d almost suspect she was using the shoulder-to-shoulder closeness of a piano duet as her baseline for normal human interaction. And as previously noted, her face is extraordinary — which makes it a continual assault on the heart. If she’s like this with her classmates too, I genuinely feel sorry for them, and there may be a steadily growing population of people currently in the process of reading entirely the wrong thing into it.
As for me — I have a handle on it, thank you very much. It only costs me a flushed face, a racing pulse, an inability to stop sweating. I’m managing to hold on at just-below-fatal. Whether she’s aware of her own beauty or not, the effect is equally bad. She has the face of an angel and the proximity of a devil.
Also, right now, as a matter of fact. I am currently being subjected to the full violence of Kanzaki-san’s beauty. Her entirely too-perfect face directly before mine. Slender arms, slender legs, willowy in impression — but her height is about the same as mine, which means if either of us leaned forward even slightly, our lips would—
I take a step backward before I can finish the thought, and answer:
“Today was… good too.”
Wringing the words out somehow. At which point, for some reason, Kanzaki-san closes the gap I just made, pressing that flawless face forward without the slightest hesitation, directly before me, and:
“I’m glad.”
Like a flower quietly putting out its first buds — she smiled.
After all of that, I still know nothing about Kanzaki-san.