Well, I’d never consciously given it any thought. Certainly I grew up surrounded by trees, but only now did I realize I knew them by name. But, just like being able to tell salmon and greenlings and white-spotted char apart, this knowledge didn’t amount to anything useful.

‘I just know the names of trees, that’s all. It doesn’t serve any purpose.’

In the mountains it was much more useful to be able to tell apart the types of wind and cloud so you could accurately predict the changing weather.

Trees are trees. They are there whether I know their names or not, budding in spring, heavy with leaves in summer, laden with berries in autumn. When I was a child, playing in the woods on an autumn day, I’d hear the gentle plop of berries and acorns falling around me. It was a soothing sound. Just knowing they would fall whether I was there or not brought me peace.

I recall one particular time, when I had just turned ten, playing in the woods and thinking that even if I collapsed right at that moment and stopped breathing, the berries and the acorns would keep on gently dropping to the ground. It filled me with a curious sense of liberation, creeping up from the earth and through my feet. I am free, I thought. Then the wind turned, and cold and hunger sneaked up on me, and all at once I remembered the particular challenges of being human.

‘You must know the names of flowers, too?’

The question pulled me out of my reverie. Flowers? I knew a few that grew in the mountains but none of the ones you find in a florist’s.

‘It’s pretty cool to know the names of flowers,’ he said.

‘You think so?’

‘I do. Not knowing things means you’re not interested.’

I began to feel a little low as a result of this conversation. It was as though by discussing the trees and the flowers – things I had some knowledge of – the huge gaps in my musical knowledge were somehow widening. The client we’d just visited had asked me about a particular pianist’s tone, a famous pianist by the sound of it, and I had been left floundering.

‘What you see in the scenery is different from what I see,’ Mr Yanagi said. I agreed. There were so many things I needed to notice.

‘Any kind of knowledge is useful,’ he said.

Was he trying to cheer me up?

‘Do you mean in the sense that it’s better to have plenty of topics to talk about, rather than just a few?’ I ventured.