The Forest of Wool and Steel

by Natsu Miyashita

  Yuni or Kazune – one of them – could no longer play the piano? Why?

  ‘Their mother said, “My daughter’s at a place where she can’t play for a while, so we’re going to leave the tuning for now.”’

  I didn’t want to believe it. My memories resounded to the strains of their piano. I didn’t even want to think about which one might have stopped playing, but I knew which one I most wanted to go on.

  A huge and jagged stone seemed to drop into the pit of my stomach.

  Kazune. I loved her playing. I wanted Kazune to go on playing the piano. But for that to happen, it had to be Yuni who had stopped. I was filled with guilt for even wishing it.

  The office suddenly felt cold. I shook my head vigorously to dispel all these notions.

  It’s the same when you’re willing someone on to win a piano competition – it means you’re hoping another person is the loser. It’s hard to condemn a wish, though – it doesn’t mean it’s going to come true. And if it does, the wish-maker can’t be held responsible. Fruit falls from a tree whether I’m there to witness it or not. Somebody laughs, somebody cries.

  I hoped Kazune would keep playing. As I wished this, I tried hard not to picture Yuni’s cheerful, smiling face.

  The next day I paid a visit to a new client. It was perfect timing since it kept me from brooding over the twins.

  The piano was a very old upright. The client was still playing it but it was not known when it had last been tuned. All this I’d heard from Miss Kitagawa, who took the call.

  ‘Tomura-kun, would you handle it?’ she asked, and of course I nodded. I wanted to build up my client list and welcomed the opportunity. The more experience the better.

  ‘There may be a few issues with this client,’ she added.

  Better that the client had issues than the piano. When the client had issues, that didn’t necessarily mean the instrument did. But when the instrument had problems, that meant the client did too.

  When pianos have not been maintained, it’s very difficult to revive the original tone. In the worst cases they’re rendered quite useless as musical instruments. When I’ve told clients their piano needed repairs, they’ve sometimes turned me down flat, which has felt wretched.

  ‘But I’m sure it’ll be – OK. From his voice I’d guess the man’s in his twenties.’ Miss Kitagawa beamed. If she said he seemed decent, then he probably was. I decided not to speculate about his ‘issues’ and wait until I met him.

  I put the address into the satnav and headed off. The square, brown bungalow, typical of the area, stood on the shady side of the street, on a corner.

  There was no nameplate outside but when I rang the bell a man of about my age opened the door.

  ‘Very nice to meet you. My name is Tomura.’

  He gave no response to my greeting.

  The whole place was very compact. A narrow door led off from the hall to a small bathroom, with another to the kitchen. He led me through that and on to the living room beyond. The piano was right up against the wall on the far side, blocking off much of the window.

  The client pointed at the piano without looking up, his shoulders thrust forwards. I wondered if he was unable to speak, but then I remembered he was the one who’d made the phone call. His jogging bottoms and frayed hoodie with its sagging neck fitted him like a second skin, and I figured this had to be the outfit he wore all the time.

  Last tuned who-knows-when, this upright piano had lost its black lustre, the top board and upper panel both dull and faded. Aside from sheet music, a crowd of other items fought for space on the top board – pencils, magazines, books, even a tennis ball – but it was reasonably clean of dust, suggesting the instrument was indeed in routine use.

  ‘I’ll go ahead and look at it,’ I said to the man, who still didn’t meet my eyes, and I laid my tuning case on the floor.

  Opening the fallboard of the piano, I tested a key and couldn’t believe my ears. The note was way out of tune. The key next to it was off, too. And the next one along, and the one next to that, and indeed all the rest of them. A faltering, hesitant sound, muffled, making me nauseous as I listened – not a single note in its rightful place. This was going to be a tough job, I knew. I wondered if I was up to it.

  ‘I’m going to start now. It’ll take quite some time, so please just do whatever you like. I’ll call you if something comes up.’

  The man didn’t react to any of this.

  Normally at this point I’d ask what sort of sound the client was hoping for, but there was no time for that now. It looked as though I’d use up all my allotted time simply getting it back in tune.

  I began by removing the clutter from the top board, opening it up, and removing the upper panel. It was terribly dusty inside. A yellowing sticker on the inside of the sideboard revealed that the piano had last been tuned fifteen years earlier.

  Even so, I knew this piano hadn’t been abandoned. There was evidence it was being played, but it was hard to imagine, considering the state it was in.

  I cleaned up all the dust that had accumulated inside. Apparently this guy played with the top board open sometimes, because a whole variety of detritus had fallen down among the dust: a paperclip, a cap for a propelling pencil, a rubber band, a thousand-yen bill and a faded photograph. Dusting the photo with a tissue, I found the image of a young boy, smiling shyly at the camera from his place at the keyboard of the piano. I placed these objects beside the magazines from the top board and my box of tissues.

  Moisture seemed to have accumulated behind the piano where it leaned against the wall, causing some of the strings to rust, besides which a number of the hammer shanks were warped. Checking each one I worried about managing to fix them all before I could begin the tuning proper. It was hard to believe that none of the strings had snapped yet – I didn’t feel at all confident of being able to restore this dilapidated old instrument.

  Reaching out for another tissue to clean the dirt off the strings, my eyes fell again on the photograph, and I blinked in surprise. It was the young man. It sort of looked like him, and it sort of didn’t, but I realized that the sweet boy in the photo was the same man who lived here now. The boy in the picture had such a different air about him that I simply hadn’t made the connection.

  I picked up the photo and studied it. Yes, the resemblance was there. What could possibly have happened between then and now, I wondered, to change the smiling boy in the photo into this decidedly unsmiling man who can’t look me in the eye or offer a single word? Still, I had work to get on with, and no matter what shape a piano might be in, there was always hope.

  There is always, always potential – even in a long-abandoned piano, cast aside in the worst conditions. If a tuner is called out on a job, that always means someone is planning to play their piano. No matter the circumstances, it will be ready for action once it’s been through our hands.

  And so I began, intent on getting this piano back to the best condition possible.

  The smallness of the house meant I could sense the young man’s presence throughout. Even focused on my work, ears listening intently to count the vibrations, I was all too aware of the man in the room next door, listening along.

  I wondered if he was planning to sell the piano after it was tuned.

  Hours later, I was finally able to call out ‘I’ve finished!’, and the young man appeared at once, his eyes still unable to meet mine.

  ‘Several of the hammers are warped and some of the tuning pins have become loose. It’s possible to repair them, but at this point I’ve just done a temporary fix.’

  The young man kept his eyes to the ground throughout my explanation.

  ‘Would you like to try it out?’

  There was a long pause and then he gave a faint nod.

  I had doubts that a person who wouldn’t even look you in the eye would play in front of someone else, so was surprised when he tapped a note on the keyboard – middle C – with his right index finger.

 
That middle C was unexpectedly powerful, but you can’t tell how well an instrument’s been tuned from a single note. The man remained motionless, standing hunched over the piano. I was about to suggest that he try playing a short piece when slowly he turned around. His face wore an expression of complete surprise. For the first time, our eyes met for an instant, then he looked away again. This time he played middle C with his thumb, and then all the way up the scale – do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. His left hand now fished around behind his back in search of the piano stool. He dragged it towards the piano, all the while facing the keyboard. Carefully, he at last sat down to play the whole scale from middle C with both hands.

  Normally it’s hard to relax when a client is testing out a piano I’ve just tuned. I tense up, knowing my work is being evaluated right before me. But this time I felt calmer than before I’d started the tuning.

  From his seat, the young man looked over his shoulder at me.

  ‘How is it?’ I asked.

  I needn’t have bothered. He was smiling – the young man was smiling, just like the boy in the photograph. Before I had a chance to feel his delight properly in my heart, he’d turned back to the piano and started playing.

  Decked out in his grey jogging bottoms and hoodie, his tousled locks sticking out in all directions, he leaned forward with his large body and began to play. His tempo was so slow I didn’t recognize it at first, but I soon realized it was Chopin’s ‘Little Dog Waltz’.

  No story came through from the music at first, but gradually a little dog came into focus. I’d started gathering up my tuning tools and turned in surprise to look at the man. This wasn’t a little dog, it was a big dog. Chopin’s dog was based on some toy breed like a Maltese, but the one summoned by the young man was something larger and a little ungainly, more like an Akita or golden retriever. The tempo was too slow and the notes uneven, but it was clear that the young man, just like a boy or a little dog, was enjoying playing. Occasionally he’d bring his face close to the keyboard and appeared to be humming.

  So there are dogs like this, too, I thought. And pianos like this.

  Watching from the far side of the small room, I listened to the young man’s playing, with all its intensity of emotion, and when the piece ended I couldn’t help from breaking out in a heartfelt round of applause.

  Music Is No Competition

  Like people, each piano has an environment best suited to it. Pianos in a concert hall, resplendent and bold, dazzle us with their gorgeous, peerless sound. At least that’s what I thought. But who’s to say that they’re the most beautiful? Who decides that something is the cream of the crop?

  Since that day, I’ve often recalled that young man in jogging bottoms who avoided my gaze. No one listened to him play and he sought no audience. My presence on that occasion was of no significance to him, but I was witness to the blossoming of his shuttered heart as he played. He enjoyed those frolics with the dog so much – the joyful embodiment of playing the piano.

  A concert hall wouldn’t have worked. That particular piano was destined to wait in that little house for him alone to play. And that was fine. That quiet, solitary joy was not something you could appreciate in a large auditorium. This was a piano that allowed someone to smell the scent of a little dog and to stroke its soft fur – music at its most noble.

  I could picture the person who had taught the young man to play, and how much he had relished the task. Music is there to help us enjoy life, not as a means to outdo everyone else. Even if you do compete and a winner is picked – the person who enjoys himself the most is always the real winner.

  There’s no comparison between listening to music in a large concert hall with other people and being so close you can feel the performer’s breath. It’s not a question of which is better or more valuable. The joy of music resides in both, although the experience might be different. The glistening of the world as the morning sun rises, the glowing as it sets – who can say which is better? The morning sun and evening sun are the very same sun, yet the form of their beauty differs. That’s what I figure, in any case.

  You can’t compare them. And it’s pointless to try. An object that holds no value to many people can to someone else be utterly precious. The desire to have a world-class pianist play your tuned piano in a concert hall may be a noble goal for some – but I felt that my vocation lay elsewhere.

  I would not aim to become a concert piano tuner.

  It might be foolish to decide something like that at this stage. It takes years of experience, training, dedication – and even then only a handful of lucky people will ever make it. But denying that possibility now might be seen as a form of running away.

  Gradually, though, it was becoming clear to me. Music is no competition – and if that’s the case, it holds even truer for tuners. A piano tuner’s work lies far beyond the realm of competition. If anything, a tuner should aim for a certain state of being, rather than a place on the podium, a ranking in some race.

  Bright, quiet, crystal-clear writing that evokes fond memories, that seems a touch sentimental yet is unsparing and deep, writing as lovely as a dream, yet as exact as reality.

  I would summon up those lines from the writer Tamiki Hara, lines I’d read so often they were etched in my memory. Saying them aloud raised my spirits. No other words could better express what I aim for in my tuning.

  A call came informing me my beloved grandmother was on her deathbed. I rushed back home to the mountains but didn’t make it in time. She had already breathed her last.

  The funeral was a small one, attended only by my family, a few relatives and the villagers.

  My grandmother had been born in a poverty-stricken village, married young, and had settled in the mountains. She’d made a living in the lumber business, but had always been poor. Others who’d settled in the mountains at the same time had, one by one, left and moved to towns, leaving only a scattering of families behind. The lumber business failed after her husband died young, in his thirties, and she went to work for a friend who’d gone into livestock farming, and there she raised her son and daughter. Her daughter left the mountains after middle school and the end of compulsory education and later got married in town. Her son, my father, left to attend sixth-form college, as I did, but then returned to work in the local government office. He got married and then my younger brother and I were born.

  That’s all I knew about my grandmother’s background. She was a hard worker and a woman of few words.

  Out at the back, behind our house, facing the woods, was a dilapidated old wooden chair. It had been there as long as I could remember. Grandma would sit there sometimes, staring out at the mysterious expanse of forest beyond. I didn’t think there was anything to see besides a lot of trees, and always wondered what she might be looking at.

  Now, back in the family home and staring out at the same scene, I felt someone behind me and turned around. My brother was walking over, winding a scarf around his neck as he approached.

  ‘Wow, it’s freezing,’ he said, and came to stand next to the ancient chair where I was sitting, legs crossed. He looked around. ‘It’s kind of scary, actually, how nothing ever changes up here.’ He laughed.

  ‘Definitely,’ I said and laughed with him. There was one difference, however – the white birches planted at the front of the house were far taller and more imposing than when we’d both lived here.

  The wind blew and my brother flinched.

  ‘You know, I went to the beach this summer,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘With guys from my seminar group at college.’

  ‘Did you swim?’

  My brother snorted and shook his head. ‘I can’t swim. You know that.’

  Neither of us could swim. There was no pool in our little school in the mountains. There was a public pool in the local town in the foothills and some of my friends went there to learn, but when my brother and I graduated from middle school we weren’t even able to float on our ba
cks in the water.

  ‘Have you ever seen the ocean?’ my brother asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  Our school trip in middle school took us to the southern part of Hokkaido, where I saw the Sea of Japan in autumn. The tuning school was near a harbour, too. Even so, the ocean was a rare and special sight for me.

  The wind picked up again, my brother shrank into himself a little further, and the leaves rustled boisterously.

  ‘When I was walking near the sea, it sounded like the mountains at night,’ he said.

  I could hear my heart thump loudly. The sound of the mountains at night. Had I known how they sounded? I tried to bring it to mind, but all I could picture was a night in the mountains that was still, so very still.

  ‘You know, like on nights when there is a gusty wind, like today, there’s a sound? Trees swaying in the wind make a moaning sound.’

  ‘Right.’

  The sound trees make when they bend in the wind. The leaves tremble, the branches shake, tens of thousands of trees echoing each other. I remembered how my little brother, scared, would crawl under Grandma’s futon covers.

  ‘I heard the same sound by the ocean,’ he went on. ‘I looked around for the mountains, which didn’t make sense since I was next to the sea. “What’s that sound?” I asked my friends.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘And they said it was the roar of the ocean.’

  The roar of the ocean. I’d heard the term before. Although I hadn’t known it was like the sound of the mountains at night. ‘It’s strange that the mountains and the sea would make the same sound,’ I said.

  Gazing up at the treetops, my brother chuckled as he pondered my observation. ‘Do you think that when people who grew up by the sea come to the mountains they’re surprised to hear the roar of the ocean?’

  I looked up at the sky, which was now a faint purple. A pale moon peeked out from the edge of the mountains. Pretending to look at the view, I flashed a glance at my brother’s profile. Had he always looked this kind and thoughtful? It felt as though I hadn’t looked at him properly in years. My little brother, always blabbing about something. He’d been a handful and, being two years older, I always had to keep an eye on him. Before I knew it we’d conformed to a stereotype: me as the quiet, reasonable elder brother, him as the more outgoing younger brother everyone fawned over. I had never intended to be dissatisfied with that.