Episode 85: The Sound I Loved

Music was the only thing I needed.

From before I could remember, I was playing. My fingers were touching piano keys. Nothing moved me except the sound I made myself.

Because sound doesn’t betray you. Even when small, clumsy fingers touched it, sound always answered. And the more you touched it, the more the tone became beautiful, became yours. The sensation of melody reaching all the way to your fingertips. The more I practised, the more I felt myself sharpening, refining — I loved that feeling.

The Kanzaki name, my parents’ expectations — none of it was necessary. I fell captive to music entirely on my own. Practice was never a burden. On the contrary, I grew restless if I wasn’t in contact with sound, so whether in lesson time or outside it, my hands were always on some instrument or other.

Music is extraordinarily precise, extraordinarily composite. The techniques accumulated one by one build connections with other techniques, act on each other, and through the medium of one’s own sensibility, sound is woven into being. A single misalignment can be fatal. The higher the level, the more pronounced that tendency — like walking a tightrope, not a moment’s inattention to spare. That was true of a single performance, and of life as a whole. Anything that might become noise in the music had to be eliminated. I had to keep refining myself, sharpening myself, maintaining the purity of sound.

Naturally, classmates who produced nothing but crude noise had no place in my life. Apparently I had some advantage in appearance, because people periodically asked me out — but romance does nothing for music, so I had no use for it. On the contrary, there were any number of musicians destroyed by love, and I had no intention of repeating their mistakes. Surrendering one’s sensibility to emotions mediated by another person was the height of stupidity. I knew my own sensibility was the most reliable guide I had.

I kept everything at a distance and devoted myself to sound alone. In consequence, measured against other people, my results climbed steadily. I left Japan early, made the fullest use of the Kanzaki name and its connections, and relocated abroad. In Vienna — the heartland of music — I went on facing sound.

While I gave myself over to sound, boyhood passed, my voice changed, and I felt quietly grateful that what I was drawn from was fingers rather than a throat — and as I learned to incorporate even the growth of my own body into music, the power and dynamism of my playing began to receive recognition. The summer I turned twenty-two, deep in youth.

I encountered another sound.

The encounter came when I returned to Japan for the first time in years, to compete in an international competition. A girl who had ended in disaster at the same competition where I took the Grand Prize as a matter of course. Her name was Aihara Anon.

To be honest, her playing was nowhere near my level. Her ceiling — the farthest point she could reach — was somehow visible through the performance itself. It was a playing that felt earnest, a little clumsy, with no room for play in it. You could sense her straightforwardness, her lack of flexibility.

And yet for some reason I couldn’t look away from that sound, which was everything mine was not. I think what drew me was something like her obsession toward music — the strength of will that refused to let go of sound even without the gift of talent or lineage.

And it was a kind of inevitability that such an obsession with sound would turn toward me — who was, in nearly every sense, music itself.

I found her endearing. She had no interest in me as a person — she couldn’t quite conceal that, owing to a certain lack of artifice — but she kept approaching, trying to extract even the smallest hint about her own music. That earnest quality was something I loved. Being treated by her as music itself made me glad.

A feeling I had never had toward anyone before. And in the first place, simply being involved with another person was something I had no experience of. The distance between us closed with accelerating speed, and my bewilderment only deepened.

When I held her, I thought: I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything. I know how much force to use when striking a key — I don’t know how tightly to hold a person. I know how long to let a finger rest in a key — I don’t know how long a kiss should last. How much force, how much length, how much depth — I didn’t know any of it.

The not-knowing frightened me. Frightened me, and yet — merely gripping her warmth, gripping the fingertips that played those wholly unrefined sounds — I overflowed with tenderness, and that frightened me too. That my own heart was being invaded by her, by Aihara Anon — that frightened me.

What frightened me most of all was this: that my music — the purity of sound I had spent my life refining and elevating — might degrade.

Knowing nothing in the world but sound, I pushed her away to keep the one thing I had. I put a lid over my own feelings. And when I did, the fingertips that had accurately gathered the shape of love began to produce sound even richer in feeling — and I thought: yes, this distance is right. The memory of holding her once is enough. Any closer, and my sound would be swallowed by love.

Ironically, it didn’t end there. Rather, going forward, what I had was more to direct my thoughts toward — forever.

She conceived my child. When I learned of it, I decided.

I had let her go, pushed her away, for the sake of my music. Someone like that has no right to love a child as a parent. But — if that child one day reached me through music — then at that point, perhaps…

◇◇◇

Kanzaki Takuto’s monologue was so entirely self-serving, so solitary, so completely sold over to sound — and yet it was also overflowing with a love that left me with nowhere to put my feelings. I had assumed he had no interest in either of them at all; I’d been building to confront him for it — and now I couldn’t find a single word.

Into that silence, Kanzaki Takuto shrugged, and offered a sardonic smile.

“Has that settled things for you?”
“Not at all.”

I let my undigested feeling answer for me. But I had no follow-up words ready, so I just looked steadily into his eyes.

As my vision adjusted to the dark, I noticed that his eyes carried a violet-indigo gleam — and seeing that, belatedly, I felt the blood connection between him and Shion in a way I hadn’t before.

As though guided by that connection, two voices rang out together.

“Uta…!”
“Uta-chan!”

Shion in her pure-white dress and Anon-san in her suit appeared before me, out of breath.

Two voices calling my name. In the dark, it felt as though light had come in. How had they found us here, in a place this unobtrusive?

“How did you both—”
“Shion said she wanted to talk to you and you weren’t replying, so we went looking for you together. Then someone mentioned Kanzaki Takuto had gone off down a corridor with a schoolgirl and…”

She must have been genuinely worried. Anon-san was breathing hard. Leaving the explanation to her, Shion pressed herself close against me. Then, toward Kanzaki Takuto directly in front of her, she said:

“Don’t bother Uta. Father.”

The final word came out more haltingly than anything she usually said — she was clearly unaccustomed to it. And haltingly or not, as if to say that was the thing worrying her far more than any encounter with her father might, she gripped my hand tight.

Those fingers — fingers that had been dancing over keys only a short while ago — were trembling faintly, and I squeezed back to steady her.

Then Kanzaki Takuto’s voice sounded in the dark:

“Sorry, Shion. Even so — to have made a friend this important to you. You’ve grown, haven’t you. Today’s performance was wonderful.”

The violet-indigo of his eyes trembled, just slightly. But that irritating smile remained fixed in place, and his voice was low as ever.

“…Thank you.”

Shion answered without concealing her wariness. At her response, Kanzaki Takuto shrugged — and then turned to face Anon-san.

“It’s been a while, Anon.”
“…It has.”
“Thank you for raising Shion so beautifully, on your own.”
“Thank you in turn for the support over the years. That much I am grateful for.”
“That much.”

Anon-san equally unmoved, equally closed. Kanzaki Takuto shrugged again. From what he’d said earlier, there was clearly love in him for them both — and yet he stood there as though he simply had no other way to show it, mild smile in place.

And then, that faintly disreputable air still intact, he took a step toward us and spoke.

“I’ve genuinely been waiting for this. I’ve been dreaming of it.”

At his sudden declaration, Shion flinched and hid behind my back. Anon-san stepped in front of us both, placing herself between us and him.

“What are you—”
“Sorry, Anon. For leaving you alone all this time. For running from you and from Shion instead of facing you both. I know I was wrong. Uta-san confronted me about it just now, and I felt it freshly — that I chose to live as a musician, chose to protect my sound, and cut the two of you off as the price. That as a father I was the worst, the whole time. So—”

His voice, his violet-indigo eyes, trembled faintly. From the difference between how he’d spoken to me and how he was now, I could tell that these words were being offered with something that was, for him, sincerity. That didn’t mean they deserved forgiveness — but at least they were true.

However, Anon-san had no obligation to receive them straight. Words like lit flame in the dark:

“Don’t go making us into some tragedy of your own.”

The words struck clean. In that instant, I saw Kanzaki Takuto’s smile freeze.

And Anon-san continued:

“It’s true that I struggled, often, over Shion. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to protect her sound or guide it, and I suffered. But that wasn’t because you weren’t there. It was simply because Shion mattered to me that much. The suffering was the measure of my love, nothing more. And now — I find even those difficult days dear. That suffering connects to the Shion of today, it led to the meeting with a precious friend, and I am happy in the time I spend with Shion and Uta-chan. We aren’t alone. So don’t make us play a part in your sentimentality without our consent.”

Those words struck Kanzaki Takuto’s cheek — and at the same time struck deep inside me. That Anon-san had thought of me like that. The clarity and force with which she loved Shion. The fact that she called these days happy. It made me glad. Shion must have felt the same — she gripped my hand tight, as if to show it.

And the words that touched us gently became a blade that cut Kanzaki Takuto in two.

“That’s not what I meant, I just—”

That Kanzaki Takuto, spoken over like a child, biting his lip. Before Anon-san, the large rugged figure counted for nothing. He was simply a boy. And paradoxically, that was proof that he still loved her. But his love — then as now — could never reach her. Having given everything to music, he could only exist before Anon-san as music, not as a man.

“If there’s nothing more — we’ll be going.”

Anon-san said it with composure.

At that, Kanzaki Takuto, as if fulfilling the only proof of his existence available to him, wiped the smile from his face and spoke.

We had forgotten. That Kanzaki Takuto, who could only exist as music, was simultaneously music itself. That his life — having pursued sound so far that he sacrificed Anon-san and Shion in the process — was, for those who pursue music, an incomparable guiding star.

“I won’t come forward actively as Shion’s father going forward. You don’t want that, and I know better than anyone that I have no right to. I’ll continue to fulfil the minimum obligation of financial and practical support — I have no objection to that continuing. But in return — I want to be allowed to provide an environment that matches Shion’s ability. As a musician, today’s performance moved me deeply. A talent this young and this bottomless — too large for Japan to contain — a talent that might perhaps soar to heights even beyond mine. Simply encountering that genuinely made me glad. So—”

Eyes lit with the obsession of a man possessed by music, violet-indigo irises blazing.

“I have decided to recommend Shion for the Vienna music school.”