Picking Bones from Ash (7 page)

“What you say is true, of course. Satomi may not have had access to the best teachers. But that is also why students from the countryside, like her, are generally of a better caliber. It is only truly gifted musicians who come from the outside to end up at Geidai,” she finished sweetly. “Satomi must be truly talented, or else she could never compete with you.”

That evening, as we ambled through the hallway back to our dorm room, she pulled me aside and told me that I would need to learn to work on my temper if I were to succeed in college. Could I not see, she asked, that Sachiko was a very literal girl, always playing everything note perfect and angry at herself if she missed a finger in a chord? “We must feel sorry for her,” Shinobu said. “It’s a terrible thing in life to be a limited person.”

“Is it true?” I asked impatiently.

“What?”

“That only the very talented students from the countryside end up at Geidai?”

She smiled. “They know that we will either fail miserably because we cannot adjust to their ways … because we get into fights”—she nodded meaningfully—“or that we will have something they can never have. They are afraid, Satomi.”

The question of talent was widely discussed at Geidai. It was the magical secret ingredient that separated all of the students and because it could not be meted out, its existence was questioned, and sometimes argued like the life of the gods themselves. That Shinobu and I were strange and accomplished was taken for granted. But it remained to be seen whether or not we would be put in one camp or the other: the group of general students destined for careers in teaching, or that rare breed who might actually be artists.

While there was plenty of speculation among the girls on the subject of talent, the teachers were unwilling to give any of us their formal blessing. I found this resistance to be troubling.

“Your teachers have indulged you and let you play only what you wanted,” my piano instructor Uchihara-sensei said to me. She was a tiny woman in her seventies, and age had made her more brittle than frail, like
the fossilized twig of a tree. “If you intend to teach, you must be proficient in Bach.”

“I don’t intend to teach.”

“Neither did I when I was your age. Do you think you are better than I am?”

I considered this. It was more that I sensed a certain limitation in her character. The world, I suspected, would never embrace her the way it would embrace me. “I’d like to play Rachmaninoff,” I said. “I like the stories he tells. I’m going to be bored if I have to play even
more
Bach.”

She studied me, her eyes tiny, cold and dark as if they had been pressed from coal. “Perhaps next year, if you pay attention to me and pass your exams.”

Alone, I practiced my Bach preludes. In the company of my classmates, I studied music theory, art history, and literature. Outside, the cherry blossoms dissolved like sugar in the heavy rains of spring and a wave of fleshy green leaves exploded through Ueno Park, bringing the smell of nature in through my window. I worked my way through Uchihara-sensei’s lessons. I tried to listen to her. But I began to study the Lento from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 1 on my own. I indulged myself in the melodic lines, in the way the voices braided together like a conversation. I imagined my mother and me as we had been before her marriage, when we had lived in wild Kuma-ume.

In the dorm at night, I drew little sketches of Uchihara-sensei and me engaged in a lesson. I was usually a sad little pencil in the drawings, and Uchihara-sensei an eraser, struggling against a desire to rub out what I wrote, even as she tried to convince me to write even more on paper. One of my dormmates, Taki, was in the fine arts program and was studying portrait painting. She liked to wear a beret, as though she were in Paris, and I sometimes threw her into my cartoons as a little teacup with a cap on its head, admonishing us that our great battles were having no effect at all on the direction that art in Japan was now taking. I always drew Shinobu as a tattered novel, disinterestedly watching our antics from a bookshelf.

“You know,” Taki said to me, as she looked over my shoulder while I sketched, “you are a pretty good artist, for someone so untrained.”

“You are a pretty good artist too, for someone so untrained,” I replied.

“Hey!”

“I’m just kidding. See?” I held out a sheet of paper and pointed out how the intelligent teacup had once again saved the life of the hapless pencil stuck inside a trash can.

At the end of the semester, each music student performed in the recital hall, located just above the school’s administrative offices. The floor of the auditorium was weak, and even just one too many bodies on the second floor caused the ceiling over the offices to sag. It was not uncommon for some suit-attired woman to come marching in during a performance and demand that five people leave the audience, or risk collapsing the entire building.

“Come hear me play,” I told the other students. “I’m going to have a surprise.”

“You’re going to finally collapse the building?” someone asked.

“Something much more interesting than that,” I promised.

I did not even tell Shinobu what I intended to do. “Remember,” she advised, “you must be smart about how you work with other people here.”

“I know.”

She frowned. “I’m not sure that you’ve taken my lectures to heart.”

I was only somewhat disappointed when my mother phoned to say that she could not come to hear me play—Mineko needed her for some unspecified emergency—for the auditorium was full and two latecomers were turned away from the back of the room. I flexed my hands and prepared to play. I would show them an earthquake.

I dutifully fingered my way through Bach’s Prelude no. 1 in C Major, as Uchihara-sensei had expected. But when it came time for me to perform the Mozart Piano Sonata no. 5, I stretched my fingers and began the Rachmaninoff instead. I had known, of course, that this would be a surprise. Uchihara-sensei would not be pleased that I had made a program switch, but my strategy was simply to play so well that Uchihara-sensei would have no choice but to allow me to work on more Rachmaninoff next semester. When I finished playing, I stood up to take a bow. No one clapped as they had after the Bach. The room was silent, girls glancing at each other, unsure of what to do.

I strode from one end of the stage to the other, bowing the way my mother had trained me. Still silence. Then I began to worry. Even if what I had done was unexpected, the audience should have been moved. Just a little. I searched for Shinobu and found her sitting in the middle, as she
had promised she would be. I smiled at her and she flinched. I continued to smile, willing her to lift her hands, and finally she began to clap, the sole person in the room to do so. A moment later, Taki joined in, and then the room filled with the warm, appreciative applause I had expected. I smiled, triumphantly, and exited the stage where Uchihara-sensei was waiting for me in the wings.

“I’m sorry,” I began, “it’s just that I wanted you to know that I could …”

“Sloppy,” she declared, before rattling off like an old crab.

I rolled my eyes. Of course I had done something rather unusual, but I certainly hadn’t been sloppy. Eventually, the old woman would see this.

By the time I had gathered my things and made my way down into the audience area where Shinobu and Taki were waiting, most everyone else had left the auditorium, though I could still hear the excited rumble of gossiping voices tumbling down the stairs.

“I wish,” Shinobu sighed, “that you had told me what you were going to do. I would have advised you to use the Rachmaninoff as an encore. Satomi, what if you aren’t invited back next semester?”

“Of course I’ll be invited back,” I scoffed.

“They could fail you.”

“But I didn’t fail,” I said. “The truth is the truth.”

We began to wend our way toward the exit. “You know I admire your spirit.” Shinobu shook her head. “I understand it, really. But now you’ve made Uchihara-sensei look bad. The other teachers will say that she cannot control you.” Shinobu began then to detail a plan for how I was to extricate myself from the very grave situation that I was in. Her ideas involved writing letters and appealing to different teachers in the music department and much bowing, which she herself would coach me to do correctly. But I only half listened, for something had caught my eye. Rising out of one of the auditorium seats like a ghostly wisp of fog now materializing into human form was an older woman wearing a black felt cloche fitted close around her temples. I stopped walking. The woman was staring at me, and though I could not place where I might have met her, there was something familiar about her bearing.

She smiled, a slow, liquid expression that spread from her lips to her eyes and gave them warmth. I smiled back.

“They say that you are very daring,” the lady said. Her voice, though
notched with age, was confident and rich. It was a voice that had spoken of many things and without much fear through the years.

“Thank you.”

“They say that what you have done is problematic.”

I saw that she had a cane and as she began to shuffle at a slow but determined pace, I moved to help her. It hurt me to see someone who carried such an air of dignity about her moving with so much difficulty. But Shinobu gripped my wrist and kept me in place.

The older woman said, “The best students always know when they need a new teacher. And they also know when they no longer need any teacher at all.” She pulled a small piece of paper out of her coat pocket with her free hand. “Call if you like.” She smiled one more time, then bent her head to focus on her steps. We heard her slowly shuffling along and, out of respect for her age, waited for the sound to fade away before we too departed the hall.

“Who was that?” Taki finally asked.

I did not recognize the name and handed the sheet of paper over to Shinobu. “She wrote that my wrists are too stiff.”

“It’s Rie Sanada,” Shinobu breathed.

“Who?”

“She left you her phone number.”

“But you aren’t supposed to take lessons off campus,” Taki noted.

Shinobu tossed me a look and gave her head a barely perceptible shake. “No,” she said. “We aren’t.” Then she linked her arms in ours and led us back to the dormitory.

All during the second semester of that first year, I’d looked forward to the train ride from Tokyo to Hachinohe for the New Year holiday. I knew it would be long and tiring, and then I’d have to deal with Mineko once I finally arrived at my destination, but I was looking forward to seeing the passengers and the scenery change. And indeed, once I started my journey home, I loved having the sense that I was someone with somewhere very, very far to go. It made me feel that my own story was particularly important again.

I sat in my most college-girl-looking outfit possible, a pleated skirt and a fitted sweater that I’d bought with money Mr. Horie had sent to me, and a dramatic pair of large gloves I’d found in Ameyoko, a flea market. The
gloves, or rather the gauntlets, were leather, and therefore obviously imported from the West. People gave me a wide berth, though I was very happy to tell the one person who asked me where I had gotten those oversized things that I was a pianist, and that protecting my hands at all times was of utmost importance. The news spread throughout the train, and thereafter, when people walked past me to go to the bathroom or to look for the
bento
seller, they gave me little smiles, which I ignored, preferring to stare haughtily out the window.

At Hitachi station, there was the usual transfer of passengers and the new passengers avoided sitting next to me because of my gloves. I was surprised when a young man plopped down in the seat opposite me, grinning as though we’d met long ago and had finally been reunited. I snuck a look at him. He was handsome in that self-aware way, with round eyes and full lips and a straight nose. Immediately I didn’t trust him. I always assumed that overconfident and good-looking boys thought they could get away with things, and planned to.

“Are you going to go boxing later today?” he asked me.

“Do I
look
like a boxer?” I asked.

“From what I understand, looks can be deceiving.” He grinned at me. “You never know what kind of physical power even a little girl might have.”

Who was he? Someone from Hachinohe who remembered how I had attacked Mineko? I scanned the car for other seats where I could move and be alone. But there were few. Most had little old ladies or drunk older men, and I wasn’t entirely certain that moving next to them would stop me from having to have these kinds of inane conversations.

“These are gauntlets,” I said, pronouncing the foreign word very slowly.
Gon-to-re-tto
.

“Are you expecting a sword fight with someone?” he persisted.

I hadn’t anticipated that he would know how the gloves were originally used.

“I read a lot of English literature. Mostly in translation, of course, though I try to read the original too.”

“In Hitachi?” I snorted.

“We have books in Hitachi,” he said soberly. “And if you learned to read by going to school in Tokyo …”

I raised my eyebrows.

“… at Keio University, then you would be able to read just about anywhere. Even in Hitachi. Anyway. It’s not like
you’re
from Tokyo either.”

I liked this directness, even though it was intended to humble me a little. “No,” I agreed. “I’m sorry. I play the piano. I’m trying to …”

“Protect your hands?”

“Yes,” I lowered my head. “And I guess I thought if I wore something this strange, people would leave me alone on the train. I have this fear that I’m going to run into people I know.”

“Why would that be a problem? I’m always happy to run into friends. I don’t see them enough as it is.”

I shrugged. “I’m supposed to be a genius. And I might not be.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

I stiffened. “What do you hear, exactly, and from whom?”

He grinned. “My name is Masayoshi. I’m about to be your brother-in-law.”

Chieko had married a year earlier, and now my mother was quite caught up in the preparations for Mineko’s nuptials, even going so far as to come down to Tokyo to look at silks and see what went on at a Tokyo wedding banquet. This man, Masayoshi, was an attorney and the brother of Mineko’s intended. He’d known in advance which train I’d be taking and had decided to try to catch the same one.