Episode 67: The Ideal of Beauty

The TV was on — a sound that never usually reaches me — and my blurred consciousness sharpened slowly around it. When I opened my eyes, the room looked a little different from usual: the low table pushed aside, a futon laid out in the space it had left, me lying in it. Through the corner of my vision I could see the corridor-kitchen, where Mum was making something.

A regional channel afternoon programme was playing. I was still thinking how unusual it was for Mum to be home at this hour when she glanced over, set down whatever was in her hand in surprise, and came to me.

“Uta, thank goodness. Are you all right?”

She peered at my face, worried.

“I’m fine… but — Mum — what about work…?”

The voice that came out didn’t quite form into words, and it was only from that fact that I became aware of the pain in my throat, belatedly. My joints ached when I tried to move; a heavy film of exhaustion had settled over my whole body, and even shifting felt like too much effort. I turned only my eyes toward her.

Mum spoke in her usual manner, halting and fretful.

“There’s no job more important than my daughter running a fever. Besides…” She trailed off, swallowing something, then forced her worry behind a smile. “Anyway, I’m making porridge. Eat that, and then we’ll go to the hospital.”

She pulled my duvet back into place. I didn’t have the energy to press at whatever she’d held back, and I nodded weakly. She responded by stroking my head, gently, in a way that was somehow unlike her — not quite like herself, and yet every bit like a mother — then went back to the kitchen. I didn’t have the energy to resist that either.

I let myself go slack, surrendering to the ache and the exhaustion, and shifted my gaze toward the television that had been grating on my ears. Men in suits were discussing some social issue with appropriate gravitas. In the top right corner, the time was displayed.

The thought arrived like a jolt.

Shion’s turn is in one hour.

“…Shion!”

By the time I registered what I was thinking, I had thrown off every trace of fatigue and joint pain and was on my feet. Whatever hurt most in my body right now, it wasn’t my body. It was my chest.

Not being able to be at Shion’s side. Not being able to hear her. Not being able to see her. That was what I couldn’t bear. Was Shion all right? The worry was overwhelming.

So I have to go.

I dragged my heavy body toward the hallway — and immediately ran into Mum’s gaze, wide with something like disbelief.

“What on earth are you doing, Uta!?”

She turned off the stove, and without a moment’s hesitation, she folded her arms around me.

“Shion — Shion’s competition — I have to go — Shion needs me there — don’t stop me—”

I forced out the words in a voice that kept cracking. But Mum held on tighter, as though she had no intention of letting me go anywhere, and spoke.

“Absolutely not—!”

At that, all my frustration and helplessness and fury at myself rose up together, and I fought back the only way I had left. I struggled in her arms with everything I had.

And then my anger became the worst thing it could have become.

“You’re never home — don’t play the devoted mother just for this—!”

For a moment, the air froze. I regretted it the instant it left my mouth.

Mum’s eyes went wide, just as I knew they would. Then she composed herself, pulled me closer, holding me still, and spoke in a voice meant to reach me.

“You’re right that I’m not a mother anyone could be proud of. Your father left. I couldn’t give you a good life. When you were small, you had to give up piano and everything else you wanted, and I was almost never home… But you are my reason for living. And I will never allow anything that puts you in danger. Even if you hate me for it. Even if you come to hate me more than you do now.”

There was a solidity in Mum’s voice that I had never heard in her before, nothing like the fragile quality she usually carried. The force of it, the rightness of it, left me with no way forward.

I was sad that my own failings had made me hurl something ugly at her. I couldn’t bear that the culmination of summer with Shion had come to this. I couldn’t stand that I was the kind of person who would break a promise — to stay beside Shion through her performance, to never look away.

When I became aware of it, I was already crying in Mum’s arms.

“But… but…”

I repeated it like a child throwing a tantrum, and pressed my face into her thin chest, worn down by years of labour.

She stroked my back, taking all of it in — the anger, the grief.

“It’s all right… Shion said so herself, on the phone. ‘I’m fine. Please look after Uta.’ So trust Shion. Rest today, all right?”

At those words, my heart turned over. My breathing went ragged, and I couldn’t stop the sobs. The competition waiting ahead of her, and still she could say that — the grace of it was unbearable to love, and the inability to be there with her was unbearable to endure.

But I couldn’t waste what Shion had said. So I had nothing left to do but—

“I’m sorry for saying something cruel…”

—whisper it.

◇◇◇

The only sound in the room was the television, left on. The low table set beside the futon. On the table, a bowl of rice porridge. With Mum at my back to lean against, I managed to bring it to my mouth. The gentle warmth and taste met my tongue. Mum’s body, usually looking so frail, felt just slightly larger than I remembered, and something in her warmth settled into me — and embarrassed by it, I said:

“If you sit that close, you’ll catch it.”
“I have a mask on, and I’ve disinfected. I’m fine. Just let someone take care of you for once.”

I didn’t have the energy to push back at that, or at the warmth of it, so I went on in silence, lifting spoonfuls of porridge to my mouth — and then my ears caught something from the television.

“Today, at the concert hall near the station, the International Piano Competition will be held, bringing together promising young performers from around the world.”

The competition on the screen was exactly the one Shion was entering, and I couldn’t help my eyes going wide. It landed again, fresh — Shion is competing somewhere that matters like this. I stared at the screen as though I could will the news to carry a prayer, and then —

“Eh.”

The sound escaped before I could stop it. The face I had been holding in my mind appeared, without warning, directly on the screen.

“Particularly noteworthy is Kanzaki Shion, who recently won the Grand Prize at another competition. Her exceptional precision and expressive range have attracted international recognition.”

As the words played, there on screen was a scene I had watched from a seat in an audience. Shion playing the Pavane for a Dead Princess — the piece that played the day we met.

I did recall it: there had been an imposing camera set up just beside where I was sitting that day, pointed at the stage and filming. I remembered noticing it. And the reason for it was now playing out in front of me.

I was still taking in the fact that Shion was a far greater performer than I had realised — and then—

“You’re joking.”

The words slipped out again. This time not only from me; I heard Mum draw a sharp breath behind me. And from that reaction, and from what was on the screen, a rush of answers converged all at once.

Why — the very first time I heard Shion play, in the music room after school — had her sound struck me with such overwhelming force?

Why — when I looked at Shion at the piano — did she trace so perfectly the outline of an ideal of beauty I had carried for years? More than trace it: why had she become that ideal so completely, and so quickly?

Why had Mum already known Shion’s name as “Kanzaki-san” before I had ever told her?

Like an answer key to all of it, the announcer’s voice read from the script. Sepia-tinged footage, old and worn, played on screen.

“Kanzaki Shion — daughter of the celebrated Kanzaki Takuto, she attracted attention from early childhood as a piano prodigy. In recent years her results have dipped somewhat, but it seems the moment for her talent to fully bloom may finally be approaching.”

When I was small, I had seen a “piano prodigy” on a screen like this one, and been captivated. I never managed to start learning piano — and out of that frustration, that longing turned inward, I had started writing. The novel that became I Dedicate This Final Note to You.

The origin of everything. A memory lodged somewhere deep — and the footage on the screen aligned perfectly with it.

Which meant.

The “piano prodigy” I had admired as a child. The ideal of beauty that had been the origin of everything. It had always been Shion.