Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  “Muscle memory,” she explained, when she saw the look of surprise on my face. “You must see the ballet students at school? They start each day with pliés and tendus to train their bodies for related steps. Their bodies remember these poses. We musicians must learn to do the same.” She sighed. “It is a shame how little this is taught.”

  I looked at my hands, feeling for a moment as though she had replaced my old fingers with these new ones. “That’s it?”

  “Essentially,” she said. “Although, if you are going to go overseas, the way that I did, you must learn to hear music differently. Must learn to play it differently. They won’t respond to your current sense of musicianship. We forget,” she sighed, “that Mozart and Beethoven are part of their culture. Not ours. When they hear us play, we sound to them the way that we do when we speak English. We have an accent. It will take work to understand this and go beyond it. I can help you and I will.”

  My lessons with Sanada-sensei would save me in Tokyo and make it possible for me to behave with all the outward contrition that Shinobu had advised me to employ. I apologized on my knees to Uchihara-sensei. I wrote letters to the music department promising that I would not pull any stunts again during my exams. I would accept a low grade and promised to play the Mozart in my next recital. I would not assume that I knew better than my teacher.

  Except, of course, that I did.

  CHAPTER 3

  Scattered Petals

  Masayoshi came down to see me in Tokyo quite often after Mineko’s wedding. The girls in the dormitory took to calling him my boyfriend, and after a while I gave up protesting and let them believe this was the case. There were more jazz clubs in Tokyo than anywhere else in Japan, and he was always researching which show to go to together. He brought me little luxuries: hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, an elaborate fruit basket I shared with my dormmates, tea imported from England. Even though he’d never been out of Japan, I couldn’t help but think of him as a cosmopolitan person who knew the secrets of the world. He kept up with the latest things and took me to see them, so the city of Tokyo quite literally blossomed before me. This went on until the middle of my second year.

  It is easy to assume when you get along so easily with someone that you know who he really is, that you can see into his heart. I accepted that Masayoshi wanted to be a lawyer, a man of the world, a patron of the arts. I also began to accept that our friendship would simply continue as we grew older. After all, we never really argued.

  Although, I suppose there was that one strange conversation we had when he came to see me on a Saturday in March toward the start of my second year. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about that weekend. People were glad that spring had arrived, but they weren’t out picnicking and celebrating hanami, or cherry blossom viewing, the way they had been just two weeks before, when the flowers were blooming at their fullest.

  Now the sidewalks were covered with fallen petals. Riding the bus through the city, I often saw a swirl of pink froth overtake the windshield so the driver had to turn on the wipers. I would arrive at the dorm with petals on my clothes and in my hair. In some ways, I found this part of the cherry blossom season, when everything was falling and fading with such abandon, even more beautiful than when the trees were at their peak.

  We were walking through Ueno Park when Masayoshi turned to me and asked, “Do you think you will really become a concert pianist?”

  “Of course.”

  He stopped walking. “Really?”

  No one had ever asked me this before.

  “Sanada-sensei says that I am an interesting player. I can move people.”

  He grinned. “I believe that.”

  “Of course, the teachers at Geidai are more concerned that I learn the correct repertory so I can go back home and teach young kids how to play the right pieces so maybe they one day will go to Geidai. Uchida-sensei doesn’t care at all about the beauty of music.”

  “So, instead of giving up music or changing how you play, you’d rather change your audience.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to leave Japan.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s the logical conclusion.”

  The conversation was starting to annoy me and I tried to change the subject by drawing attention to a funny-looking bird I had spotted in a cherry tree. But Masayoshi persisted.

  “I think it would make more sense to do something else with your life, something that fits your personality better, rather than deciding that everyone else is wrong and you are right and if you just move you’ll find people who will bend to your wishes.”

  “Who said anything about bending?” I said. “I’ve always known I was going to be a musician, Masayoshi.”

  “You know,” he said gently, “if you don’t become a musician, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve failed.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll never give up the piano.”

  “Not for anything?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  We stopped at Uguisutei, a small café, for a nice cup of green tea and Uguisudango, white, green, and red bean sweets. Then Masayoshi said, “Sometimes, I think about giving up law.”

  “Why?” I was taken aback.

  “It’s very hard, Satomi,” he said seriously. “Many hours. Lots of competition.”

  “That’s what it takes to build a new Japan, isn’t it?”

  “What happens once we have our new Japan, Satomi? What do people do then?”

  “You enjoy it.” I exploded. “I don’t know what you are trying to say. If this is the kind of philosopher you were going to become, then I think it’s a good thing you became a lawyer instead. It’s ridiculous wondering ‘what if’ all the time.”

  At this he bowed and apologized. “Of course,” he said. “It was a silly train of thought. Please excuse me.” But his contrition was so formal that I felt unsettled the rest of the afternoon.

  During dinner, I told Shinobu about our fight, leaning my face close to hers over my tray of food in an effort to create privacy.

  “Satomi,” she said seriously, “have you ever considered that he might be in love with you?”

  “Masayoshi?” I scoffed. “But … that’s ridiculous. He’s just a friend. Like you. I only know him because his brother married my stepsister.”

  “I don’t think a friend brings presents all the time the way that he does. And he’s always trying extra hard to find things for the two of you to do that you will like. And …”

  I cut her off. “Please don’t ever say anything like that to me again. Masayoshi. In love.” I picked at my bowl of rice. “Disgusting.”

  “I know you don’t like the idea, Satomi. But if he is in love with you, don’t you think you should consider his feelings?”

  “And do what?”

  She pursed her lips. “Maybe let him know somehow that you don’t love him, or spend less time with him.”

  “I … he … when did you become such an expert in men?” Even as I said this, I knew the answer. Shinobu had started dating someone. He was, importantly, Japanese. He was also, unfortunately, married. But Shinobu insisted that they were in love and that being a mistress to a wealthy man wasn’t the worst thing in the world because she’d always have time for the piano and wouldn’t be saddled with laundry and housework.

  Fortunately, the next time we met, Masayoshi didn’t even mention our awkward conversation. He just smiled when he saw me and immediately started laughing at a story I told him involving Sachiko, the stuck-up soprano from the Ginza. I was relieved to be in his company again, to be the “interesting” person he so admired. We continued to spend time together on the weekends and during the holidays when I was home in Hachinohe.

  In the middle of my second year of college, however, Masayoshi began to act a little bit strange again. It all started when his father had a small stroke around the same time that I was caught up in preparing for the annual Messiah concert.
Every year, students of Tokyo University of the Arts got together to put on a performance of this Christmas tradition. The piano students were made to sing the choral parts with the voice students. Instrumentalists played in the orchestra. Ostensibly, the whole point of the concert was to help raise money for orphans in Japan, just as Handel’s initial performance had been to help provide for the poor.

  I’d now had four semesters at Geidai in which I hadn’t upset Uchihara-sensei, but had in fact been praised as one of the most promising students. The transformation, they said, was fortunate because I’d come close to being expelled. Now I felt confident in my place at the school, so I decided to give voice to the frustrations of piano students participating in the Messiah concert. I complained that we were not at all accustomed to having to share the stage with anyone. We did not want to be put in the back row of our voice groups just because we were not singers. We wanted a chance to audition to stand in front.

  The teachers, who were always happy to indulge our competitive desires, agreed. When they posted the seating chart, I found myself ranked above Sachiko. She and her friends were incensed and demanded that I give up my spot on the risers.

  While this was going on, Masayoshi was still coming to visit me every weekend, even though his father was ill. I tried to entertain him the same way I always had, by telling him stories about people at school and what I had experienced during the week.

  “Sachiko,” I said to Masayoshi at one point, “doesn’t even have good pitch. That’s what happens when you learn to sing without playing an instrument very well. You never really develop a good sense of intonation.”

  Day after day the drama intensified. Someone put broken glass in my futon, which Shinobu discovered just before I climbed in to sleep. I retaliated by stealing one of Sachiko’s music books and gluing all the pages together. Shinobu did not approve of these antics, but continued to support and defend me, stalwartly informing Sachiko that I had simply had the better audition. The singers turned away from me with disgust in the cafeteria, a childish bit of drama that I was happy to reenact for Masayoshi when we met. The pianists started to urge me to change my major from piano to voice. To my delight, I found that I had become something of a leader.

  Finally, one day, Masayoshi burst out in anger. “Do you have any idea how egotistical you are? I mean, this Messiah concert is supposed to benefit orphans. And here you are obsessed with your rank and how superior you are to everyone else!”

  I was shocked. We walked along silently while I absorbed his criticism.

  “You may think,” I began gently, “that we are all quiet and pretty girls engaged in the beautiful world of art. But we are not. School encourages us to compete with each other. I’ve been fighting with other girls my entire life.”

  “I’m beginning to think that the whole reason you became a musician in the first place is just so you can compete against all these girls you claim to dislike so much.” He began to talk about an uncle who lived in Kyoto, whom he believed had become a painter out of pure love for the art. “That’s why you should do music. Because you love it. Not because you think it makes you better than other people.”

  “Competition is what makes art great,” I insisted. “If we all just did what we felt like, there would be many mediocre musicians and artists.”

  “That’s an elitist attitude,” he shot back. “It’s naive too. Haven’t you ever noticed that museum exhibitions always show off things that belonged to rich people? I mean, what about poor people?”

  “I was poor and my mother still managed to make our lives beautiful.”

  “Your mother is an extraordinary woman,” he said seriously. “But most people don’t get to spend their days stuck in a university practicing scales or trying to win competitions, Satomi. Most people have jobs like I do. Art should be something that we can enjoy and that makes our lives more human. It shouldn’t be about all this childish backstabbing.”

  “What are you talking about?” I screamed back at him. “Your whole job is about competition. Aren’t you always going on and on about how Hitachi is devoted to getting Japan to be as powerful as possible as soon as possible?”

  “That’s different.”

  “No it’s not,” I insisted. “You can’t start an argument with me, then expect me not to say something back to you when you are wrong. If you weren’t an elitist person,” I challenged, “you would have studied philosophy, or opened a little bar somewhere so workmen could relax after a long day. You wouldn’t be buying me tea and handkerchiefs and bragging about beating the Americans one day through economics.”

  For two weeks, I heard nothing from him.

  Then one afternoon I was in my dorm room with Shinobu, drinking a cup of tea, when I heard the phone ring. “It’s your boyfriend!” a trio of sopranos stuck their heads into the doorway and squealed.

  It was a quick call. He told me that he had some extra work to do and that he would need to cancel our plans to go to the zoo. I said that I understood and tried to devote my newly gained free time to practicing. The truth is that I sat in a practice room and read a book, tapping out a few passages on a keyboard whenever someone passed by. Masayoshi canceled the next weekend. And after that, he simply stopped calling.

  Once or twice I called him and even tried to send a few lighthearted postcards. But he didn’t respond.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?” Sachiko and her friends chortled.

  “I told you,” I said evenly, “he’s not my boyfriend.”

  “They must have had a fight,” Sachiko cooed. “How tragic. Like Puccini. Would you consider killing yourself? In Puccini operas, the soprano always dies.”

  I picked up a book and hurled it across the room, and the girls all ducked. After that, they stopped teasing me.

  Once or twice, Shinobu tried to talk to me about Masayoshi. “Satomi …,” she began.

  But I knew what she wanted to tell me. “Don’t,” I said. “It’s a ridiculous idea.”

  When I went home to visit my mother during the next holiday, she casually let it slip that Masayoshi had quit his job as an attorney and had gone to study Buddhism. He was engaged to a girl whose family owned a temple.

  “Buddhism!” I exploded. “What is he doing that for?”

  “He is thinking of becoming a priest,” she said, quite seriously.

  “Why?”

  “I think it has something to do with his family. His father had a stroke, you know. And even though he is doing much better, Masayoshi took it very hard.”

  “But …”

  “You don’t know, Satomi,” she said to me gently, “what it is like to see your family in jeopardy. It can change you.”

  You’re my family, I thought. I’ve had to watch you change. Instead I said, “But he can’t change that much. No one changes that much. He told me he wanted to be an attorney so he could see the world. Go to La Scala.”

  She lowered her head. “Masayoshi is doing what he must to help his father. The family is very vulnerable right now. I imagine Masayoshi feels he is helping everyone somehow.”

  Still this made no sense to me. I could imagine Masayoshi taking up painting with greater earnestness, or asking for a transfer to go live in Europe. When people receive a shock, they sometimes have the extra energy to do the things they have always wanted to do but have put off. Still, I couldn’t understand how he would suddenly give up his job to study Buddhism.

  I had something of an answer a couple of years later. I was visiting my mother again during the last school break I would have before graduation. Mineko was at the house with her two small children, and my mother was busy acting as grandmother. She sat on the floor with them and played with a small wooden top, the traditional kind that you can still find for sale in countryside tourist towns. The top was made of wood and painted with red and green stripes. You pulled a string, then released the top on the ground. Midway through its spinning cycle, if it was handled correctly, the top would flip over and spin on its reverse
end. The older girl could make the top spin easily, but the littler girl had difficulty releasing the top so it landed on the ground and spun. My mother was showing her how to do this by holding the little girl’s hands with her own. I couldn’t help but feel some reproach in the way that she did this, as though she were silently telegraphing to me that should I have children of my own, she’d be willing to lavish them with the same care. This was confusing because I’d always been under the impression that my mother did not want me to follow a domestic path.

  I must have sighed deeply because Mineko turned to me and blinked rapidly a few times. “She’ll get it eventually. They aren’t born knowing how to do everything, you know.” She was talking about her children and the spinning top.

  “No. Of course not,” I said.

  “Children take patience.” She smoothed her skirt and took a sip of tea, the silence giving weight to her words, making it clear that she had meant to insult me.

  “Satomi-san is very talented and very busy and it is understandable she doesn’t have the patience to deal with small children,” Mineko said matter-of-factly. The way she said it, she might have been talking to herself, or to an invisible audience about me.

  “That’s probably true,” I muttered.

  “Yes,” Mineko continued lightly. “It’s one of the reasons why Mother didn’t think it was a good idea for you to marry Masayoshi. With time, of course, he’ll understand that. Actually, I imagine he’s understood it already.”

  Ara! My mother exclaimed. The littler girl was clapping. Her top had finally spun correctly and the older girl was looking uncertain, not sure if she should cheer her little sister for having learned to do something correctly, or if she should feel threatened that a skill over which she once held dominance was now being learned by someone much younger.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  Mineko put a hand to her mouth and her eyes opened wide, like the greedy mouths of koi seeking food just beyond the surface of a pond. “You knew, though, didn’t you? I hope I didn’t say something I shouldn’t have.” She continued to babble, with false nervousness, that she hoped she hadn’t offended anyone.