The others had formed a circle, and were tossing the ball to each other.

She was sitting on the gymnasium floor, hugging her knees, her back up against a corner, when Mima-chan came over with a group of girls.

‘Don’t you want to play?’

‘Um … no.’

Fuka always sat out during PE. It would be a disaster if she hurt a finger playing volleyball.

Back when she was a freshman, they’d been practising vaulting when Fuka missed her landing and twisted an ankle, and her mother had come into school to complain and the whole thing had escalated. This is a critical time for her, her mother had shouted, she has a competition soon! So she’s hurt her foot, but what if it had been her hand?

Mima-chan and the others exchanged a look. ‘It’s because Fuka-chan has piano.’

‘Oh.’

The girls walked off. She heard them giggling.

‘My fingers are so important and it just wouldn’t do to injure them.’

‘I just have to play the piano, you know?’

Their voices were shrill, as if they intentionally wanted her to overhear.

PIANO, PIANO, PIANO.

Fuka’s days in elementary school were clearly divided into boxes – school and piano. Gradually, she spent more and more time at the piano than on schoolwork, and as far as she was concerned that was fine.

She was told to take time off from school to have lessons in Kyoto with a famous piano teacher. She would attend lessons from her grandparents’ house, who lived in the area.

She was often told to practise more, but not once did an adult ever caution her to study harder.

Her mother said to the teachers at school, ‘You’re concerned about her school attendance, but would you have a look at her record in piano competitions? Couldn’t you consider this as equivalent to her school record?’

She didn’t attend school much, and she thought that was OK.

Until the final piano competition of her elementary school days when, aiming at the top prize, she came nineteenth.

IT WASN’T THAT SHE WASN’T feeling well, or was out of sorts.

She’d thought she’d played as well as always, and hadn’t made any mistakes, at least none she was aware of.

And yet look what happened – she ended up in nineteenth place.

This was a national competition, her grandmother said, so to come nineteenth was amazing, but her mother’s face expressed only shock. Later when she saw how she was marked, the difference between her and the top ten highest scores filled her with dismay.

‘Things aren’t easy, are they,’ she heard her grandfather say to her grandmother. ‘How much longer is Fuka planning to play?’

Fuka didn’t have a father.

‘You’re a single parent, so you shouldn’t overdo it,’ her grandparents said.

‘I’m not!’ her mother snapped.

They hadn’t made any decisions about studying abroad, in which country or school, or with which teacher, so Fuka stayed in Japan.