7: Zuizui Zukkorobashi
“Probably this red dress for the Final Round, right?” Aya smiled wanly at Kanadae, who seemed deep in thought. “Eh, what does it matter. I won’t even make it, so.”
Though she meant it jokingly, Kanadae turned sharply to her. “Aya, enough with that talk. Do you know how many people fail in the documents or auditions even though this is all they want? If that’s how you’re going to think, you may as well quit now. No need to do this for Father’s sake.”
“Sorry.” She looked over the dresses spread before her glumly.
* * *
One day before the start of the Yoshigaë Competition, after receiving her performance order, Aya returned to her lodging in Tokyo, the home of Dean Hamazaki.
The garden at the center of the bold traditional-Japanese residence was dark and lush. Into a large, unoccupied room, Aya and Hamazaki’s daughter Kanadae had packed as many dresses as would fit to choose what Aya would wear in the upcoming weeks.
To wear a dress onstage is a young girl’s dream. Perhaps some even learn the piano to play onstage wearing one.
But as one becomes a performer, the dress also becomes an irksome presence. It’s unwieldly. It’s expensive. It can’t be worn more than a few times.
In the case of competitions, a woman usually wears a new dress every round. Should one remain until the Final Round of Yoshigaë, therefore, one would need four dresses. There’s nothing wrong with wearing the same dress four times, of course, but even a brief performance can render a dress sweaty or stained; rapid dry cleaning—if indeed it is rapid enough—can often be prohibitively expensive.
Though one can rent, one naturally wishes to wear something one is comfortable in: the smallest factor can affect one’s mood, and there’s no going back on a rental.
Due to Aya’s last performance being, well, a while ago, she owns no dresses. The dresses she’d worn until she was thirteen had all been made by her mother. Naturally preferring comfortable, boyish clothes, she had been considering wearing dress pants.
Anyhow, with her last real competition being in elementary school, she had no idea where to begin with appropriate dress for a concours.
When Kanadae asked what she would wear and she casually replied “the dress pants I have at home,” she shrieked her disapproval. Aya didn’t bother to fight against her claim that dress pants were “weird” and that a woman must wear a dress to show off her true flair.
Of Hamazaki’s two daughters, Haruka was studying voice in Italy, and Kanadae was two years ahead of Aya at the same conservatory. Aya didn’t know whether Hamazaki had requested it, but Kanadae had always kept an eye out for her since her matriculation. Though it had felt somewhat obliged at first, the youthful Aya and the laid-back Kanadae got along well, and now seemed like sisters.
As the Hamazaki sisters both owned clothes and were of similar frame to Aya, they agreed to lend Aya their things to wear. While Aya chose neutral darks without thinking too hard, Kanadae picked out bright yellows and purples, to contrast with the all-black orchestra with which Aya would share a stage in the Final Round.
Not just pianists, but female musicians in general, shunned clothes obstructing their shoulders, and usually picked sleeveless outfits, but Aya felt anything too strappy was too unlike her to feel comfortable. After countless changes, she settled on a sleeveless but well-supported dress. More than anything, it was invisible—it wasn’t long enough to be stepped on, she could reach without it straining, its straps wouldn’t fall off her shoulders: it would do.
Kanadae had once seen a shirt custom-made for a guitarist. Most shirts have the front and the back, put together with some sleeves; this one, for maximal comfort in the arms, had the fabric cut such that the front panel also had the front half of the sleeves, and the back similarly the rear half.
After countless repetitions of “not this one” and “not that one,” four dresses were left: one of an orange closer to a red, a bright blue, a rich green, and a sequined silver. The two were now debating in which order to wear them.
Kanadae was, in many ways, the perfect person to be helping Aya: not only did she have good fashion sense, but she also understood Aya’s position. Of being admitted to conservatory on a single person’s word, of entering a competition in part as a gesture of thanks, of having no particular desire to win.
“Listen, Aya,” Kanadae carefully began. “I imagine you think I spend all this time with you because Father asks, right?”
“What?” Aya started. I was not expecting this today. Not to mention that she did in fact believe that at some point.
“I was your, um, your fan once.” Kanadae turned grave. “Even though this is all I am now, I was once told, as much as you were and are, that I have a good ear. That I would win any competition no matter what instrument I played. Someone who would have her debut before long. At one point, Father would even ask, ‘Who else?’”
Good musicians almost as a rule have good ears, but even Aya recognized Kanadae’s gift. Not only did she have miraculously perfect pitch, she had a sense for weight, timbre, and composition that could only be described as surreal. She enjoyed genres beyond classical with equal fervor. “These guys are getting signed somewhere big,” Kanadae would say about an indie band which would inevitably enter into an enormous contract. Though her own music lacked any particular charm, her wonderfully incantatory timbre was a common point of praise among critics.
“I still remember when I first heard you play,” Kanadae said as if to herself. “I’d heard Father’s other students till I wanted to go deaf all my life, and there were some damn good technicians among them. But you were different. I was entranced by your musicianship. It was full, bountiful somehow, yet sharp and agile.”
Aya was dizzy. It didn’t sound as though she was talking about her.
“I got so excited, I went up to Father and said, ‘She’s going to be something incredible!’ It wasn’t confidence, you know? I just knew.”
Aya scratched her head.
“But then.” Kanadae opened her eyes wide, fiery and fierce, and stared into Aya’s face. She felt her blood chill. “But then she quit. I was shocked, and somehow embarrassed. I’m only saying this because it’s us, and now, but I felt so hurt—like it was a betrayal, somehow.”
“I’m sorry,” Aya apologized reflexively. Kanadae snorted, and her expression softened.
“And then how many years passed? The year before last, or something like that, Father comes home and comes straight to my room and says, ‘Kanadae, your ear really is never wrong.’”
“That’s …” Aya trailed off, stunned.
“Yeah. When he went to your place and heard your Shostakovich.” Kanadae smiled conspiratorially. “He said that he’d enroll you in his school. Not ‘wanted to enroll you.’ ‘Would enroll you.’ He seems chill when you meet him but he’s actually really stubborn.”
“Maestro Hamazaki.” Aya felt a warmth spread throughout her body. “So, in a way, I have you to thank for my education.”
“Yeah, damn right! You should be grateful!” Kanadae laughed her loud, boisterous laugh. “Well, I’m sure he wasn’t acting on my instincts alone, but still.”
Sometimes Aya wondered whether her mother had put in a word before it all.
“Anyhow, my self-worth and ego is on the line, so you have to try hard, yeah?” Aya nodded to her joking chastisement. “Good. Now. Which dress is which?”
“The silver’s going to be my last.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little old-fashioned?”
“No. I like it best. My name has ‘night’ in it, remember? It kind of feels like moonlight for me. It’s perfect.”
“OK, fair enough. If you say so.”
“I’ll work hard so I can wear it in the Final Round. Thanks so much, Kanadae.”
With such a genuine sentiment and direct look from Aya, it was Kanadae’s turn to blush and avert her eyes.
With Kanadae behind her as she stepped out of the room, Aya sighed involuntarily.
The temperature had dropped noticeably.
Late autumn. A chill all the more stinging for being unexpected.
Though Kanadae’s words had been heartening, standing outside, alone, Aya couldn’t help but let her negativity seep in.
I can’t believe the competition is tomorrow.
I’ve got to focus.
Anyhow, her performance would be on the last day. Number 88. The number of keys on a piano, not that she’s superstitious. She was simply awed by the sheer number of contestants, that they numbered so many.
Why do I have to be judged before others, after all this time?
So Aya thought again and again.
She was already living happily with music. Of course she thought she might want to work in music, but she’d never considered being a concert pianist again. Maybe a studio musician, but she’d never even enjoyed performing in front of others.
And there was one other thing.
She’d gotten a request, through the conservatory, that there was a documentary team that wanted to interview her. A documentary about the competition, with lots of time one-on-one. Though there were nearly a hundred contestants, Aya had been singled out. Though she had politely declined right away, she did not feel very good either way.
The Prodigal Daughter Returns: she could just see how they’d frame it.
The girl who disappeared herself from the stage is back. If she even hinted at some sort of in memoriam for her mother, they’d lose their minds. She felt depressed at the thought that her competition entry would be appraised thus.
She had no regrets about quitting back then. She loved music. She had never tried to distance herself for it. She couldn’t stand the perception that she’d been wanting to come back, or that she’d been forced into it. Aya normally was fairly mellow and generous, but had her compulsions as well; for the next while, that compulsion would be to dissuade any notion of “resurrection” heaped upon her.
Ha, well, after all this, if I fail out of the First Round, what do I become?
Aya smiled bitterly.
Maybe it was Hamazaki’s energy around her, but her footsteps carried her back to the school. Despite the late hour, the school was bright as day.
The practice rooms are generally open twenty-four hours a day. Before a competition or during finals week, the music really never stops.
Her reason for dropping by was just to release some of her joy and her anxiety, to let them go before heading to bed; moreover, trying on those innumerable dresses had given her the urge to remind herself what the evening had been about.
As expected, the building was nearly full. A Chopin étude or Beethoven sonata trickled out of this and that room. She saw two Yoshigaë contestants. Even the hallway thrummed with anxious, fatigued energy.
With her favorite piano being used, she strode to her second-favorite when the music from one room made her halt mid-step.
Hm?
She didn’t quite understand what she was hearing. An indescribable mass of sound.
She couldn’t parse the melody, separate out the phrases.
Jazz? She listened harder.
It wasn’t anyone she knew: the students studying piano weren’t all that numerous; she could usually suss out who was playing within a few bars.
A composition student? She put her ear to the door. There were a few jazz and composition students, but this wasn’t one of them. She felt a queer coolth spread throughout her body.
No, this is something totally different. Better than any student. I don’t understand it; maybe I’m unable to.
The sound was big. It was loud, maybe a little, but more than anything, it was big.
She realized it was this bigness that had captivated her. The sounds from the other rooms were more or less the same, but this sound—cleansed of all impurities, even and percussive and big.
It had a heft—it was contoured, somehow—in a way that seemed almost to have physical force, seemed able to break the door down.
How in the world is there someone with this kind of ability—here?
Aya stood stock-still. Her heart spasmed.
Incredible passagework. Endless runs of octaves without a single missed or smudged note. Music of colossal complexity, played as evenly as a simple scale. She felt as though she were being bloodlet—a feeling of fear and fixation at once.
At the sudden change of timbre, Aya felt as though she were electrocuted.
The music, energetic enough to halt one’s breath, suddenly dropped into a languorous, comfortable mood.
It’s a rumba rhythm.
The rich rhythms of the left hand were towing a somehow familiar right-hand melody.
Hm? What is this. It’s almost improvised, but it’s definitely …
Aya strained to hear, and then it came to her.
Zuizui Zukkorobashi![1] This person is playing Zuizui Zukkorobashi with a rumba rhythm!
Aya couldn’t help herself: she looked through the small square pane into the room.
The first thing she saw was a broad-brimmed hat. Shaking back and forth on a worn piano bench. She could tell it was a young boy who wasn’t even fully sitting. A boy who had no idea what he was doing.
Aya strained to see his face. There’s no one like that at school. He’s really young—precollege?
He played the rumba for a little while, and then glanced at the ceiling, the wall, and stopped.
Without a moment of preparation, he burst into Chopin’s étude no. 1.
Ah!
Aya turned around and stared down the hall. He was playing the étude exactly with one of the students down the hall.
Jesus Christ. How did he hear that from inside the practice room?
Aya paled. The two of them really were playing, at tempo, exactly the same. She wouldn’t have been able to tell who was imitating whom unless she had seen it.
The sound became murky and ugly. It was painful to hear.
What …?
But the phrases were the same: waves washing in and out; the same arching melody …
She felt goosebumps over her entire body.
So that’s what it was.
He was playing the exact same phrase as the other student, but a semitone lower.
His stance as he played was as calm as one could imagine. He certainly wasn’t trying. One could have thought he was warming up.
Still rocking in his seat, he turned around.
They locked eyes. A pale complexion with big round eyes.
The music stopped.
So sudden was their contact that Aya couldn’t move, look elsewhere, or even breathe: they just gazed upon one another.
He looked just as startled, as though he was a boy caught doing something he shouldn’t do.
He’s loved, she thought. He’s loved by the god of music.
She didn’t know where the thought came from, but that was the first thought that came to her. Holy, unsullied, profoundly ordinary: she’d never seen a face like his.
The boy took off his hat and paced about. He picked up a sacklike bag and then threw the door open and flew from the room.
“Sorry, sorry!” he apologized, bobbing and bowing so hard she thought his head might detach itself.
“Why are you apologizing?” Aya asked, stunned.
“I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t be here, but I heard the pianos and they sounded like good pianos. I couldn’t help myself.” He chattered indistinctly, head bowed and still backing away. “I haven’t been able to play many good pianos. So, um.”
“What?” Aya blinked.
He heard these practice room pianos, through all that soundproofing, from outside the building?
“Wait! Who are you?”
The boy crammed on his hat and sprinted away. Aya gave chase, but he was fast, too fast. By the time she was outside, she saw him give a mighty push off the ground and jump the fence in a single elegant motion.
A trespasser?
So young. Seemingly unschooled. And yet better than any conservatory student she knew.
Forgetting the competition, the dresses, the documentary, Aya stared on dumbly past the entrance into the bigness of the night.
1. A traditional Japanese song.