Episode 56 — Where the Waves Go
“Would it be all right if Uta watched my lesson tomorrow?”
Come to think of it — the premonition had been there from the moment Shion asked that. But I hadn’t imagined it would be anything like this.
The soundproofed basement room, the usual lesson-room scene. The only difference: that Shiko-chan is watching Shion play. Just that, and nothing more.
That alone — and Shion was giving the finest performance of her life. In sixteen years of watching her, this was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard her make.
Shion’s fingers danced. The skirt she had apparently changed into specially swayed faintly in time with each press of the pedal. Silver hair swayed with a particular lustre. As if music itself, and her very self, were showing their most beautiful form to someone.
The fingering — described as virtuosic, technically demanding — Shion executed without difficulty with those small hands. However skilled Shion was technically, in normal practice she would stumble two or three times — yet today there was not a single hesitation, and the characteristic melody with its cascading dissonances rang through without a break.
And for all that the keys had to be struck continuously, irregularly — the particles of sound were consistently even. Their mass, their density, incomparably heavier than usual — as if resonating directly against the heart. And yet entirely without roughness, clothed in a refined beauty, its completeness pulling the eye helplessly toward it.
Shion’s melody right now was like the sea. Vast, beautiful, filling the whole field of vision with a beauty that caught the sunlight and glittered. But at the same time, with its enormous mass, pressing in without mercy, without pause — drawing in anything that had dived deep and swallowing it, suffocating it. A beauty so overwhelming it even carried something like terror.
I had never heard Shion play like this. No — not just Shion — a performance that married passion and technique at this level surpassed even the young Kanzaki Takuto at his peak. Measured against pianists active on the world stage, it was in no way inferior.
Shion was clearly, in this very moment, reaching a new realm as a pianist — not one step up but two, three steps at a time. With every note she was opening doors to a world I could never have shown her.
As a mother, as a teacher, there could be nothing more joyful than this. And yet I could not celebrate without reservation.
Because it was Shiko-chan. Shiko-chan was the one drawing out Shion’s beautiful sound, her tone. This overwhelming performance — every beautiful sequence of notes, every note and rest, even the silence as it crossed each barline — all of it was directed from Shion toward Shiko-chan. Not toward me, who had lived sixteen years for Shion’s sound. Not toward me, who had abandoned my own music and offered everything to Shion. It was a performance dedicated to Shiko-chan alone.
That filled me with frustration, with humiliation, with shame. All I could do was maintain the composure of a mother’s last pride, and watch from the far shore as Shion — like a seabird taking flight from the horizon toward the sun — spread her wings and soared.
Yes — a mother. I am Shion’s mother, and so I worry too. However much jealousy burned through me, I could not go against the instinct that cares for my own child.
The Shion of right now was beautiful and perfect. And precisely because of that — terrifyingly precarious.
Because ordinarily, no one can produce a sound like this for just one person. Even pouring in all the attachment and love and feeling there is, you cannot make this kind of leap. Rather — leaning on emotion instead of building technique steadily, what usually waits at the end of that path is a painful, hard return.
As it did for me — consumed by my obsession with music, hitting a wall, selling my soul, losing my own sound in the end.
But Shion, as if shaking off all my concern, kept spinning her sound without a stumble, with astonishing reproducibility and spontaneity. Its intensity didn’t waver by a hair — and it seemed exactly to represent the weight of what Shion feels toward Shiko-chan. The strength, the weight of Shion’s wish to be seen by Shiko-chan — all of it was being converted, directly and entirely, into the beauty of the sound.
Swept up in Shion’s sound, even the violent emotions — the frustration, the jealousy — were washed clean by the surging waves of music.
And then, what remained — a faint flicker of the musician’s instinct. The love of sound, whispering like a devil:
I want to see how far Shion’s sound can reach. I want to keep listening to this sound forever. How far can she fly? How deep can she dive into the music? How beautiful can she become? How far will the existence called Shiko-chan carry her?
Sinking into those thoughts — Shion’s pure white fingers, the fingers I had protected all this time and that now wished only to entwine with Shiko-chan’s, moved with ferocity, and then sank slowly into the keys. That final note, the note that touched the final cadence, resonated slowly through the grey soundproofed room.
Shion looked at her own fingers as if confirming the resonance. And then she made straight for Shiko-chan. Ran.
And then, as if leaning into the existence of Shiko-chan, sinking into it — they embraced.
Tears ran down Shiko-chan’s cheeks as she received Shion’s embrace. They glittered like jewels — tears that seemed shed for no other purpose than to convey feeling and emotion to Shion.
And then even that sight blurred. And, delayed — I noticed that tears were running from my own eyes too. Running down my cheeks, brushing faintly against my tongue.
My tears, unlike Shiko-chan’s, tasted like seawater. Salty as the sea.
And then, quietly, the thought came:
I haven’t seen the sea in a long time.