Episode 83: La Campanella

Because I’d stayed with Shion longer than planned, the concert hall had settled into the kind of silence that says a performance could begin at any moment.

I made my way along the upper level of the audience seating, the reserved section, shrinking into myself as I walked. The seats around me were filled with elegantly dressed adults, and my school uniform was, as expected, entirely out of place. Feeling the conspicuousness of it, I followed the ticket to the seat it indicated along the aisle and lowered myself into it carefully.

There was no camera beside me this time, as there had been before. But across the aisle, separated by a partition, was a row of chairs with built-in tables, and people of considerable gravitas sitting along them. That must be the judges’ panel Anon-san had mentioned. I felt the slight electric charge emanating from that section, and reaffirmed my resolve — as Anon-san had said, I would not go near that area. I was in the middle of that renewed resolution when a poised female voice came over the announcement system. A performer’s name and piece were read out, and the first competitor walked briskly toward the piano. I looked down at the programme handed to me at the entrance. Shion was tenth out of fifteen performers. I sat there already nervous on Shion’s behalf, eyes on the stage.

On the stage, a tall blond male performer was just beginning to play. I thought back to the high level of everyone besides Shion at the previous competition, and waited, very still, for the sound to come.

But what washed over me in the next moment wasn’t shock — it was anticlimax.

Wasn’t it more impressive before? I felt bad for the person playing, but — was this perhaps a slightly lower level? The question crossed my mind. And yet by the second performer, the third, the feeling still hadn’t lifted, and by the time the competition reached its midpoint, I arrived at a single truth.

No. It isn’t that the performers’ level is low. It’s that Shion was extraordinary.

It seemed that through summer break, Shion had grown far beyond what I had imagined. And because I had been listening to her sound continuously, my ears had adjusted to that level — and everything else left me flat.

That fact made me feel, all over again, just how extraordinary Shion was. And then came the weight of it: just how heavy it was that she hadn’t been able to play at the competition. I had leaned into her grief, sunk together into each other, and created a gap in Shion’s piano — and the guilt of that pressed itself against me again, freshly.

Even so, no amount of regret can turn back time.

So I prayed. I prayed that Shion’s sound would ring out properly. That it would reach every person in this hall. I wanted it for myself alone, in truth — but Shion was carrying something far heavier than my small possessive heart, and she had a talent capable of reaching places I could never touch. I wanted that to take its proper shape. There were no falling stars inside the hall, so instead I prayed to the memory of playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star together, to the days we had accumulated.

Before I knew it, the other performers’ playing had stopped reaching me entirely. Through all of it, I was only ever thinking about Shion.

And then, as if guided by those wishes and prayers, that name was called.

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

With the announcement, Shion appeared on stage, dressed in pure white. The dress was as white as a bridal gown — and yet before the sheer white beauty of Shion herself, even that colour seemed to fade.

Shion walked slowly to the centre of the stage as though scattering something extraordinary in all directions, came to a stop, and bowed to the audience. Then, the hem of her dress fluttering, she turned and adjusted the bench height before sitting at the piano. Those slender, pure-white fingers turned the score slowly.

I couldn’t look away from her slightest movement. With each motion Shion made toward the music, my heartbeat quickened. My breath stalled. Without thinking, I clasped both hands tight as though in prayer, and watched where her sound would go. I was willing it to be released.

At the centre of my vision, Shion drew one deep breath. She looked upward as though recalling something, and was still.

Then, cutting through a silence drawn tight as wire, slowly, her fingers sank into the keys. Sound began to flow. Surging like the sea, its tide rolling in and pulling back.

In that instant, the ideal of beauty enveloped my tightly clasped hands. Prayer became longing, and longing swallowed me whole.

Shion’s sound was ringing out. That alone was almost enough to fill my chest to breaking — and yet Shion’s sound was more beautiful than any performance I had ever heard from her. It was different from the previous competition, different from the summer lessons. It carried a faint sense of the familiar, and yet radiated an overwhelming beauty.

As if turning even the days she had sunk into sadness into something beautiful, Shion commanded a melody of unrelenting dissonance. Her body swayed. She played with the same piercing intensity as the very first time I met her. The silver hair caught the stage lights and glittered, shining like stars.

The sound was not music surrendered to feeling — it was music that asked to be found. It had the strength to hold every gaze in that hall and not release it. That was something Shion had always possessed, innately.

Shion’s playing now resembled the version of her I had first seen through a screen — the girl they called a prodigy. The ideal of beauty that made me reach out in longing was sounding now, in a form more refined than anything from those days.

Back then, I could only watch through a screen. I could admire and yearn, and the only place for that feeling was words.

But now it was different. Stage and audience seats. A distance that hands couldn’t bridge. And yet what the days we had accumulated between us, the promises we had tied, connected across it. The longing that couldn’t reach her had led to the meeting, and from it, a beloved ordinary life had been woven, and precious promises had been made.

“Play piano for me.”

The Shion of now was playing piano for me. Sounding her music to become my words. The Shion who normally leaned into me sweet as a penguin chick — her sound was flying, beautiful as that, soaring. As though even the past she had suffered through — the circumstances, the curse of her name — had all been a running start for the flight. The beautiful sound filled the hall, all the way to the far distance.

All I could do was follow that arc with my eyes — burn it into my memory’s film so I could put it into words later. And yet for all of that, tears blurred my vision without my noticing, and I wiped furiously at them with my uniform sleeve and kept watching. I received every note of Shion’s intricate, interwoven sound.

Just how much is Shion going to give me? How far is she going to fly? Tormented by something almost like anger, and at the same time something warm, and a piercing kind of grief, all of it directed at Shion.

I learned then: the wish to touch the ideal of beauty — the act of reaching toward it — that is what love is. I want to be her equal because I love her; I reach across any distance because I love her. Because Shion’s sound is so beautiful, everything in me is drawn into sharp relief.

As if answering my feelings, the sound grew more intense. The quickened pulse, the music — neither would stop. Shion’s pure-white dress swayed like an angel’s. Dissonance peeked through like something mischievous mixing into the flowing melody; white and black, light and shadow — everything, because it came from Shion, was transmuted into beauty. Shion’s beauty grew more formidable with every bar.

Her body swayed. Notes surged forward. Sound without the slightest wavering swallowed the hall. Her fingers struck the keys, and as if struck by that intensity her back arched — the silver hair blazed in the stage lights — and in the same instant, as though in prayer, Shion looked upward.

And her prayer dissolved into sound.

The final note rang out.

◇◇◇

I had not doubted for a single moment that her name would be called. The silence resembled the one before the performance, but my heartbeat was far steadier now.

And then, as though it could only ever have gone this way, the name was called.

“Grand Prize — Kanzaki Shion.”

Shion appeared on stage. She received the trophy with composed, refined movements, the pure-white dress swaying serenely, surrounded by applause and cheers and flashing lights.

I was on my feet, clapping with the rest, when Shion handed the trophy to an attendant and, just before disappearing into the wings —

She stopped. And waved. A wide, unguarded wave, childlike in a way that made everything refined about her until that moment seem like a dream. As the hall stirred with murmurs around me, I was the only one who had accumulated those days with Shion —

So I waved back. Wide and guileless, conspicuous uniform and all. People around me might have been looking. It didn’t matter — I wanted to say congratulations to Shion more than anything.

My signal reached Shion properly, it seemed. She waved and jumped, and broke into a dazzling smile.

It wasn’t the same as last time, when we had thrown our arms around each other. This time we were far further apart, only looking at each other across a distance that hands couldn’t reach. And yet even across that distance, the feeling of being connected — that was the proof of the days we had built together. That distance, I found I loved.

For a while we kept exchanging that private signal, just the two of us. Then, urged along by an attendant, Shion turned back again and again to wave, lingering as long as she could — until at last she disappeared into the wings.

I watched the arc of her beauty go, holding the longing of it close. Then I let out a long breath. The late-arriving relief that Shion had played properly, that everything had been all right. I let myself rest in that for a moment.

Then I stepped out into the aisle. If I went to the waiting room corridor, perhaps I could see Shion.

I was thinking that when, from the judges’ section right beside me, people began flowing out into the aisle too. I stopped at the aisle’s edge to let them pass.

“There’ll be a judges’ panel quite nearby, but please try not to get too close.”

Anon-san’s words turned over in my mind as I looked, half-absently, at the people moving past with their air of gravitas — when, without warning, something silver crossed my field of vision.

“Eh.”

The sound escaped me. That ash-grey hair. The profile of the person moving past, trailing something like a forceful, masculine beauty — I recognised it. My memories, the life I’d accumulated, ran in a straight line to the figure crossing my vision.

The silver of that hair resembled Shion’s. In childhood, I had a memory of seeing this person alongside Shion on a screen.

This was the curse Shion had been trying to shake free of. In the flesh.

“…Kanzaki Takuto.”

The murmur left my lips, and before I knew what I was doing, I was following that retreating back.