Episode 68: That’s Why I Quit Music

Reproducibility is everything in piano. Playing the score accurately is assumed — the baseline, not the achievement. Beyond that, every interpretive choice you’ve worked into your understanding of a piece must be reproducible on demand, the same way, every time. The only way to achieve that is practice, and only practice.

It was the kind of existence that could drive you mad. Competition after competition, the same assigned pieces, repeated. The more I repeated, the more pieces I could play — but they were all pieces Mama had handed me, so there was no freedom anywhere in it.

I was, in essence, the same thing as the instrument. I was being sounded by the score. Me following the notation, the piano following me. It was a cold and mechanical space. Hour after hour of nothing but the demand for precision — it was like the bottom of a lightless sea, and I felt as though I might suffocate at any moment.

The only place I could breathe was in bed before sleep, reading I Dedicate This Final Note to You. Only when I was submerged in that world — a world of words, a world without sound — did I feel free. Every night, the story’s vivid, living sentences made my heart lift. And because it happened to be a story about piano — a story about a hardworking protagonist and a heroine called a prodigy, deepening in feeling and in closeness — I found myself naturally placing myself in the heroine’s position, and in those moments piano felt, for once, like something joyful. I would finish reading and leave a comment. Just doing that eased the loneliness. Someday I want a youth like the protagonist and heroine have — radiant, full of light. That feeling was the thread, fraying thin, that kept me tied to piano.

Day after day I was ground down by music, and my attachment to the novel deepened. I came to depend on that world more and more. Dependent on it, numbing the pain through it — that was how I managed to keep going.

My competition results stopped improving, but I had the novel’s world, so I was all right. The media stopped covering me; people stopped calling me a prodigy; Mama’s frustration grew, and the practice she set became harder and harder. But I had I Dedicate This Final Note to You, so I was all right.

But that couldn’t last. Those days reached their own final note.

Just before I started high school. The novel’s updates stopped. And that — the one thing that was both a reason and the entirety of my reason to keep playing — was simply gone.

So I was going to quit piano. I didn’t know what Mama would do if I told her, but whatever it was, I no longer cared.

That was supposed to be the end. Slipping into the old music room of my new high school — the school I’d only just enrolled in — and playing the Pavane for a Dead Princess was supposed to be my last performance.

I struck the keys driven by grief and by anger at what I’d lost. I trembled with the joy of knowing that the days of being imprisoned by music were finally ending — with a bottomless, almost lunatic elation — and I struck the keys recklessly, without care. I threw out reproducibility. I abandoned interpretation. There was something clean about it. But that reckless relief didn’t last long. Almost at once, a grief like something tearing open swallowed it. Rage and sorrow surged up from somewhere deep.

Why — when you were everything, every reason I had to live, when your words saved me — why did you leave? Why did you go away from me?

Don’t let go. Don’t leave. I want you to stay. Just keep speaking to me softly through those words I love. That’s all I need — with just that, I could live in any world, however lonely. I could breathe even at the bottom of that sea where there is only sound. So why did you have to go?

The playing was a mess. It was chaos. But there was no one else in that lonely after-school music room, and it was the last time, so none of that mattered.

That was what I thought.

I had been so lost in it, so given over to the feeling, that I didn’t notice there was someone else there. I didn’t know there was a person watching my playing.

When I realised — when my eyes met the eyes of that sudden visitor — I couldn’t help the wariness that showed in my expression. The girl who had appeared out of nowhere introduced herself in a fluster as “Ogawa Uta,” offered a few words of praise about my playing, then walked toward me deliberately — and held out her hand. And at the same moment, she held out these words:

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

Those words were shaped almost exactly like the reason for living I thought I’d lost.

◇◇◇

The truth is, I had noticed. The fatigue threaded through Uta’s voice and movements, at every turn. I’d kept her on calls from early morning to late at night; I’d had her come and watch my lessons all through summer break. I knew Uta was struggling.

But I can’t manage without Uta. Without Uta nearby, I can no longer even practice properly.

So I pretended not to see it. Covered myself in innocence and looked away. I held on to nothing but the feeling of wanting to be with her.

This is what that brought about.

The waiting room — charged with tension, crowded with performers waiting for their turns.

“Shion, are you all right?”

Mama looked at me, worried. She didn’t say it in words, but I could tell she was thinking about Uta’s absence too, and about how she was.

“I’m fine. I’ll be going.”

I said it — the same brave words I’d given to Uta’s mother — and stood. And truly, there is nothing to do but try. Because if I fall apart here, Uta will blame herself. Everything we spent together this summer — all of it — will become something sad. I refuse to let that happen.

“Good luck.”

Mama’s worried gaze and her words were at my back as I left the waiting room and walked the corridor.

“Kanzaki Shion? Please wait in the wings.”

I followed the attendant’s directions through the door, behind the stage curtains, into the dark.

The previous performer’s playing drifted from the stage. But inside me, everything was still — like the surface of calm water — and there was a strange unreality to it all. It had been that way since the moment Uta collapsed. Like walking through a dream. Perhaps because Uta had been close all summer, my heart hasn’t caught up to her absence yet.

Will it, eventually?

I was thinking that, distantly, as though it concerned someone else — and then the playing stopped, and applause rose, and an announcement came.

“Number nine, Kanzaki Shion. Liszt: La Campanella.”

With the announcement, I stepped from the dark of the wings up onto the stage. The brightness of the lights was harsh.

I walked across the boards and bowed to the audience. And then, almost without meaning to, I looked up toward the seats. The area where Uta had sat, before. The seat she was supposed to be in today.

But there was no one there. Only the television camera positioned just beside it, pointed at me.

Oh. Uta isn’t here.

I thought it as if only just learning it. The dreamlike unreality caught up to something real, and reality brought despair with it. My feet felt caught. The lights should have been bright, but everything seemed dark. Breathing was difficult. Anxiety was going to suffocate me.

Muscle memory sat me down at the piano bench — but I had forgotten to adjust the height. The previous performer’s setting left my feet dangling, swinging, groundless. Even that, I couldn’t make myself care about.

Because Uta isn’t here. Uta, who was always watching me — she isn’t here. She would write about me in her novel, and in the words she attached to that there was something that felt like being given a reason to exist. Every one of those feelings like a fragment that crystallises, glittering in the dark.

Today, without Uta, that can’t happen either.

Flashing back: the day the novel stopped updating. The despair of that day.

Don’t let go. Don’t leave. I’m scared. Don’t disappear. You said you’d keep watching me. Why isn’t Uta here?

I couldn’t breathe properly. In the silence, sweat seeped cold down my back. The black and white of the keys stared up at me. Their regular order. Cold, mechanical. The bar lines of the score laid out the path my fingers were supposed to follow, commanding, like a map I had no choice but to obey.

The sequence of sounds I had repeated, so many times. Every melody I’d played with everything in me — wanting Uta to think I was beautiful, wanting Uta to love it, just a little. Wanting to show Uta. For Uta.

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

Since I met Uta, I had played to keep that promise. For the most beloved words in the world.

So when Uta isn’t here — how am I supposed to play?

The answer was nowhere. Uta was nowhere in the audience; there was no way to find it. In the end, my sound didn’t come — not until a stage attendant, noticing something was wrong, came hurrying to me.

And so the competition ended.