There was still some time before he would need to get onstage, so Katsuro sat in the waiting room, where a bottle of tea and a paper cup were waiting on the table. He poured some for himself and took a few sips.
This marked his second visit to Marumitsuen, a children’s home. It was a four-story structure of reinforced concrete, set in a grove halfway up a hillside. It had living quarters, a cafeteria, baths, and a variety of facilities for babies, eighteen-year-olds, and everyone in between. By now, Katsuro had been to plenty of these places. Marumitsuen was one of the larger homes.
He hoisted up his guitar, checking to see if it was properly tuned one last time, and sang a few notes. Things sounded all right. He could be better—or worse.
The woman with glasses came back and said it was time. Katsuro helped himself to one more cupful of cold tea before standing up.
The assembly was held in the gymnasium. The children sat up straight in a couple of rows of folding chairs. Most of them looked to be in elementary school. When Katsuro came before them, they gave him a polite round of applause, as instructed by the adults.
A microphone, a folding chair, and a music stand had been set up for Katsuro. He bowed to the crowd of kids and took a seat. “Hello, Marumitsuen!”
“Hello,” the children replied in unison.
“This is my second time here. I had the privilege of performing on Christmas Eve last year, too. I guess coming every year makes me a bit like Santa Claus. Ah, but I didn’t bring you any presents.” A smattering of laughter. “Don’t worry. I’d like to present you with some music, just like last time.”
Katsuro strummed the opening chords to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and started to sing. Everybody knew the song, and partway through, they began to sing along.
He went on to play all the classic Christmas songs and cracked a few jokes in between tunes. The kids appeared to be having fun. Before long, they started to clap. Some of them were even rocking out, in their own way.
But midway through the set, Katsuro became fixated on one of the kids: a girl seated in the second row, all the way to the left. If she was still in elementary school, she would have to be in one of the upper grades. Her eyes were staring off into space. She wasn’t even remotely close to looking at Katsuro. The music didn’t seem to interest her, and she most definitely wasn’t moving her lips to partake in the sing-along.
Katsuro was drawn toward her forlorn expression, tinged with something that didn’t belong on the face of a child. He felt the urge to make her look his way.
After he’d come to the conclusion that the standard, run-of-the-mill tunes were boring her, he tried playing the Yumi Matsutoya song “My Baby Santa Claus [Koibito no Santa Claus]” from Take Me Out to the Snowland, a blockbuster from the previous year. Strictly speaking, he was violating copyright laws by playing the song, but who was going to report him?
Most of the kids enjoyed his rendition, but she was still staring off into the rafters.
He tried playing a few songs he thought girls her age might like, but nothing hit. Maybe music didn’t interest her in general. Katsuro had no choice but to cut his losses.
“All right, here’s my last song. I always play this one to close. Thanks for listening.”
Katsuro put down his guitar and pulled out his harmonica. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes to blow the notes to a song he’d played a thousand times. He didn’t need sheet music for this one.
Its melody lasted about three and a half minutes. Over the course of that time, the gymnasium fell silent. Just before his lips left his instrument, Katsuro opened his eyes.
His heart skipped a beat in his chest.
The girl was staring into him. Her eyes were dead serious. For a moment, he panicked and almost forgot how to act his age.
When he was done with his set, Katsuro walked off, awash with more polite applause from the children. The woman with glasses pattered over and thanked him for a job well done.
He was going to ask about that girl, but he swallowed back his words. What reason could he possibly give for asking?
But as it turned out, he wound up speaking with her anyway, albeit not exactly how he expected.
After the assembly, the children gathered to have dinner in the cafeteria. Katsuro had been invited to attend, and while he was eating his meal, the girl suddenly approached him.
“What was that song?” she asked, meeting his gaze directly.
“Which one?”
“The last one. On the harmonica. I’ve never heard that song before.”
He chuckled and nodded. “That’s not surprising. It’s an original.”
“Original?”
“It’s a song I wrote myself. Did you like it?”
The girl nodded eagerly. “I thought it was great. I wanna hear it again.”
“Yeah? All right, you wait here.”
He sauntered up to his room for the night, which had been provided by the children’s home, to grab his harmonica. Once he returned to the cafeteria, he led the girl out into the hall and played the song for her again. She listened to the notes of the harmonica and gazed at him intently.
“Does it have a name?”
“It’s called ‘Reborn.’”
“‘Reborn’…,” she whispered to herself and started to hum.
When Katsuro recognized the tune, he was floored. She was repeating the melody of his song perfectly.
“You’ve got it already?”
She smiled at him, finally. “I’m good at remembering songs.”
“That’s amazing.” Katsuro looked her in the eye. The word genius flashed across his mind.
“Mr. Matsuoka, how come you haven’t gone pro?”
“Pro, huh…? I dunno about that.” Katsuro shook his head and attempted to hide the tremor rising in his heart.
“I’m sure that song would be a hit.”
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “I like it.”
Katsuro grinned. “Thanks. Me too.”
“Seri, you out there?” A staff member poked her head into the hallway. “Can you come feed Tatsu?”
“Ah, okay.” Seri bowed once to Katsuro and slipped back into the cafeteria.
He followed a little ways behind and saw that Seri had sat down next to a little boy, trying to get him to hold a spoon. The boy was slight in build, and his face was unexpressive.
The woman with glasses stood nearby. Katsuro casually asked her about the two children.
“They’re siblings. They came to live with us last spring. Fled from an abusive home. Tatsu won’t speak to anyone but his older sister.”
“Huh.”
As Katsuro watched Seri looking after her younger brother, he began to understand why she didn’t care for the Christmas carols.
When dinner was over, Katsuro retired to his room. Sprawled out on his bed, he heard the raucous sound of children’s voices through the windows. He sat up and looked outside to see the kids playing with sparklers. They didn’t seem to mind the cold in the slightest.
He spotted Seri and Tatsu, who were watching the others from a distance.
How come you haven’t gone pro…?
It’d been a long time since anyone had even bothered to ask him that—maybe ten years since he’d last tried laughing off the idea with some pathetic excuse. But his outlook was completely different then.
“I’ve let you down, Dad,” he murmured through the window into the night sky. “I haven’t even had the chance to fight that losing battle.”
He thought back eight years into the past.
2
On one of the first days of July, Katsuro received the call about his grandmother’s death. He was getting ready to open up shop when the call came from his younger sister, Emiko.
He’d known their grandmother wasn’t doing well. Her liver and kidneys were failing, and he’d admitted to himself that she was on her way out, but he still hadn’t mustered up the strength to go home to see her. He wasn’t not worri
ed about her. But he had his reasons for not going home.
“The tsuya ceremony’s tomorrow, and the funeral’s the day after. How soon can you be here?”
Katsuro propped his elbow on the counter and scratched his head with his free hand. “I gotta work, so I dunno. I’ll have to ask the boss.”
He heard Emiko inhale sharply through her teeth.
“Work? You’re just helping out, right? Didn’t you say he ran that place alone before you started? Taking off a day or two isn’t going to put him out. I thought you took this job specifically so you could take time off whenever you needed to.”
She had a point and a whip-crack memory. Emiko didn’t mess around, and he knew he couldn’t fool her with a little fast-talking, so Katsuro went quiet.
“We’re gonna be in trouble if you don’t come home,” she said in a sharper voice this time. “Dad’s not in good shape, either, and Mom’s exhausted from taking care of Grandma. Grandma did a lot for you, you know. The least you could do is come to her funeral.”
Katsuro sighed. “All right. I’ll figure something out.”
“Come as soon as you can. Tonight, ideally.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
“Fine, then tomorrow morning. Noon at the latest.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Think hard. You’ve always been able to do whatever you wanted.”
He was about to ask what the hell she meant by that, but she’d already hung up on him.
Katsuro replaced the receiver and sat down on a stool. He gazed absentmindedly at a painting on the wall, which supposedly depicted some beach in Okinawa. His boss loved that island. Every inch of this tiny bar was decked out with something Okinawan.
He gazed off into the corner of the room, where an acoustic guitar leaned against a rattan chair. Both were reserved for Katsuro. Upon request, he’d sit in the chair and play. Sometimes customers would sing along, but most of the time, he’d sing solo. They’d make a big deal the first time they heard him. “Listen to this! I can’t believe you’re a self-taught musician!” Once in a while, someone would ask him why he hadn’t tried going pro.
“Ah, come on,” he’d demur, but in his gut, his every fiber screamed, “That’s all I’ve ever wanted!” That was the reason he’d dropped out of college, after all.
He’d fallen for music in middle school. In sixth grade, he’d gone over to a friend’s house and seen his older brother’s guitar in a stand. The friend had shown him how to hold it, and that was the first time he’d ever touched a guitar. His fingers had been clumsy at first, but he’d quickly picked up how to play the main riff of a simple rock song. He tried it over and over again, and when he finally nailed it, no words could describe his euphoria. It was nothing like blowing into some recorder in music class. An unspeakable thrill coursed through his veins.
A few days later, he had taken the plunge and said to his parents that he wanted one of his own. His dad ran a fish shop. Music had played no role in his life, and he reacted first with shock, and then with anger. He told his son to quit hanging around whatever friends had planted that idea in his head, apparently convinced playing the guitar automatically made you a neighborhood delinquent.
Katsuro persisted, making every promise he could think of: “I’ll study hard and get into the best high school, and if I don’t get in, I’ll throw the guitar away and never play again.”
His parents had been nonplussed. After all, Katsuro had never wanted anything so badly. His mother eventually warmed up to the idea, and at last, his father had caved. But they’d brought him to a pawn shop, not a music store. He’d have to put up with a used guitar for now.
“Gonna end up tossing it in the dump, anyway. You’re not getting a pricey one,” his dad had groused.
Katsuro had been thrilled just having a guitar. He couldn’t care less where it had come from, and he’d carefully laid it next to him on his pillow that night. After that, he’d practiced nearly every day, referencing instruction booklets from the secondhand bookstore. To keep his promise to his parents, he studied for class just as hard. His grades skyrocketed. On the weekends, he spent the whole day locked up in his room strumming away, and his parents had no room to complain. Especially after he was accepted to the best high school in the area, true to his word.
When he’d entered school, the first thing he did was join the music club. With a few members from the student organization, Katsuro formed a three-piece band, who took every chance they got to perform. At first, they did only covers, but as time passed, they’d started to add original material with most of it written by Katsuro. He did the vocals, too, and his bandmates thought very highly of his music.
But in their third year, they disbanded. Everyone was focusing on cramming for their entrance exams. They’d promised one another that if all of them got into college, they would reunite, but that hadn’t been how things played out. One of the members had flunked the test and wasn’t able to get in anywhere. He’d eventually gotten accepted somewhere a year later, but no plan to get back together ever arose again.
Katsuro went to school in Tokyo to become an econ major. At first, he’d wanted to do something involving music, but he thought better of it, knowing his parents would be opposed, especially because he’d been expected to carry on the family store. This had been established from when Katsuro was very young, and his parents didn’t seem to have even the slightest suspicion that he might choose to do otherwise. Even Katsuro had a vague idea that this would be how things turned out for him.
His college had all kinds of clubs related to music, and he’d joined one. But before long, he knew he’d made a mistake. The club had been more into playing around than playing music; nobody took it seriously. He’d tried to bring this up on a number of occasions, but the other guys acted like he was crazy.
“Get off your high horse, man. Music is supposed to be about having a good time.”
“Yeah, what are you so uptight about? It’s not like you’re gonna make it big.”
Unable to come up with an appropriate rebuttal, Katsuro quit the club for good. He knew it was pointless to argue. They were after different things in life.
After that, Katsuro hadn’t tried to hit up any of the other clubs. He’d felt like it would just be easier to make music on his own, since being around unambitious people stressed him out.
That was around the time he’d started entering competitions for amateurs. He was used to being onstage from performing at all sorts of gigs in high school. The first few times, he’d gotten nowhere, but once he got the hang of it, he made it to the final round more often than not. These contests had their regular acts, and Katsuro became one of them.
The mentality of this group was infectious. For them, music was their sole passion. They were willing to sacrifice anything in the name of their own tunes.
I gotta try to do better than that, he told himself whenever he listened to them play.
Almost all his waking hours were poured into musical composition. Even when he was eating or sitting in the tub, his thoughts were occupied by the music he was writing in his head. This was when he’d stopped going to class, once and for all. He couldn’t see a reason to attend, which resulted in his receiving no credits and failing out of all his courses.
His parents had no idea. After they’d sent their only son to Tokyo, they’d assumed he would graduate in four years and come back home. When Katsuro had called home to tell his mother he was dropping out, she’d wailed over the receiver. That was the summer when he was twenty-one. His father had come on the line and demanded to know what the hell Katsuro thought he was doing, loudly enough to leave his ears ringing.
Katsuro was going to pursue his music. There was no reason to keep going to college.
When his father heard his reasoning, he began to scream his head off. Katsuro just hung up.
That night, his parents showed up at his Tokyo apartment—his father livid, his mother pale. They talked in that teeny si
x-tatami-mat studio until dawn. His parents had said that if he was going to drop out, he would have to move back home and take over the fish shop. Katsuro refused to nod in agreement. He’d told them that if he did that, he’d regret it for the rest of his life. And he was gonna stay in Tokyo until he made it.
In the morning, his sleep-deprived parents went home on the first train. From the window of his apartment, Katsuro watched them walk away. From behind, they looked small and lonesome, and Katsuro had unconsciously clasped his hands in prayer.
Three years passed. By now, Katsuro should have been out of college. Instead, he found himself with little to show for himself. His days were still a looped reel of contests and practice, practice, practice. He’d placed in many of them, and he assumed that if he kept on competing, a talent scout would eventually discover him. But so far, no luck. He tried sending demo tapes to record companies, but nobody bothered to respond.
Just once, a frequent patron of the bar had introduced him to a music critic, a man with white permed hair, who had listened while Katsuro played two of his originals.
At this point, Katsuro had been thinking about making a go of it as a singer-songwriter. He’d felt confident about both songs.
“Hey,” the critic said, “that’s not bad. The melody is catchy, and your voice is strong. Good stuff.”
Katsuro was ecstatic. His heart pounded, and he knew he was steps away from his debut.
The customer popped the question on Katsuro’s behalf. “Think he has what it takes?”
He went tense all over. He couldn’t dare look the critic in the eye.
The critic paused for a beat before letting out a groan. “I think you’d better quit while you’re ahead.”
Katsuro’s head snapped up to look at him. “And why’s that?”
“Look. This city is full of people who can sing at least as good as you. If your voice had something special, something unique about it, it might be a different story, but it doesn’t.”
The man cut right to the chase, and Katsuro had no response. This wasn’t news to him.
The Miracles of the Namiya General Store Page 6