Fuka secretly thought it was a question of money. Her mother worked all day long, and when Fuka got home from her piano lesson, she still wasn’t back. Cold rice balls awaited her in the twilit room, and once when she tried to heat them up in the microwave, the electricity had been cut off.

When her elementary teacher paid them the standard home visit, he was more than a little astonished to find a quality piano and soundproofed walls all around the practice room in their tiny apartment. The only items in the fridge, though, were bentos and bread brought back from her mother’s job. Fuka hardly ever saw her mother cooking or cleaning. Since all she did was work, work, work.

Even so, the gas had been cut off. Gas, electricity, water – all shut off in that order, and Fuka was strangely impressed at how the one most essential to life was the last to go off. Her mother had given her a cell phone to take with her, since she went to her piano lessons alone, but the previous day when she tried to call her mother the service had been discontinued.

As she continued to have longer and longer piano lessons, it hit her forcibly: I’m doing something that’s beyond our means.

And she didn’t just mean money.

It’s a matter of talent, too. It’s not just lack of money that’s stopping me from travelling abroad.

HOW MUCH LONGER IS FUKA planning to play?

When she heard her grandfather’s words, Fuka realized a few things.

That she wasn’t able to keep up with junior high schoolwork.

That if she continued to practise the piano as much as she did, she would never have enough time for schoolwork.

‘I don’t believe it!’ her mother had said, and wept loudly when she heard what Fuka’s grandfather had said. ‘Why are you saying this, Dad?’ she asked. ‘I’m never bringing Fuka here again. I won’t let you see her.’ Then her grandmother stepped in with a suggestion.

‘Why don’t you live with us in Kyoto?’ Her grandparents had proposed this many times before, but her mother had always rejected the idea. ‘I’m a full-time employee at my company now,’ she said, ‘and if I leave, I won’t be able to get another full-time job. Then we won’t be able to manage, Fuka and me. And she’ll have to drop the piano.’

When she started at junior high, Fuka’s mother encouraged her piano playing even more.

Fuka adored her mother.

She raised her lovingly, making up for the loss of Fuka’s father, who’d died in a car accident when she was five. She worked at two jobs: all day in the office of a delivery company, and at night in a part-time job making bentos.

‘I never had any particular talent,’ her mother told her. ‘And if you have talent, Fuka, I’ll do everything in my power to help you.’