The still air, the controlled humidity and temperature, the wooden baffles lining the walls and ceiling – I wondered what the acoustics would be like in here. Slowly I approached the stage and, without taking my eyes off the grand piano, walked around to the side and up the steps, where Mr Itadori was already heaving up the lid, his tuning tools laid out on the floor.

With both hands, he played an octave. The piano, part of the scenery until now, began to breathe. As each note was struck, the piano raised its heavy body and stretched its folded arms and legs, preparing to break into song, about to spread its wings. This was unlike any piano I’d ever seen. I pictured an enormous lion, slowly rising, eyes on its prey.

A concert-hall piano was a creature unlike any other, the sound so different from what I’d heard from the pianos in people’s homes. As unlike as morning and night, pencil and ink.

My palms were damp and I felt utterly overwhelmed. Getting a small personal piano in top condition and tuning a concert grand such as this – the two operations were poles apart. All I could do was stand there in awe.

Mr Itadori pressed each key repeatedly, paused, then pressed again, listening intently to the quality of the sounds as he manipulated his tuning hammer.

Something was approaching. What it was I couldn’t say. My heart was pounding. I had the premonition that something immense was drawing near. I could see gently sloping mountains. The scenery from the house I was born and raised in. The mountains I had never really given much thought to, nor ever stopped to look at much. But I now recalled how they would look strangely vibrant and alive the morning after a storm. And I realized that what I’d taken simply as mountains included so very much more: soil and trees, flowing water, grass growing, the blowing of the wind, animals of all kinds. One spot in the distance came into sharp focus. A single tree growing on the mountainside, its green leaves rustling.

And so it was with the sound of the piano: the instant Mr Itadori tuned it, what had been merely an indistinct tone now became lustrous, lingering and vibrant. Single notes now began to leap ahead, entwining with the others, taking on depth in tone and timbre. From a leaf to a tree, from a tree to a forest, to the very mountains themselves. Soon it would transform into music.