Mr Itadori neither laughed nor showed any surprise. He looked me in the eye, an inscrutable expression on his face. Then, appearing to have come to some sort of decision, he placed his case on the ground, took out a notebook and scribbled in it with a ballpoint, ripped out the page and handed it to me.

It was the name of a school.

‘I’m just a lowly piano tuner,’ he said. ‘I’m not in a position to take on an apprentice. If you’re serious about studying tuning, I recommend this place.’

And so it was that I graduated from school and convinced my parents to let me go to this place for specialist training. How much my family understood about it all, I still don’t know. The village in Hokkaido where I was born and raised offered only basic schooling, and once children finished compulsory education they tended to leave the mountains for the big cities. Some of the mountain children flourished away from home, while others felt overwhelmed by the large colleges and bustling crowds. Some would eventually drift back to the mountains, others would disappear for ever. Me? Well, I chanced upon the forest – an extraordinary place that the piano opened up to me – and I couldn’t return to mountain life.

At eighteen, I left the mountains of Hokkaido for the first time in my life. The training course was based in a piano factory on Honshu – Japan’s main island – and for two years I was one of only seven students, learning the techniques of tuning from morning till night. Classes were held in a warehouse of sorts, so it was blisteringly hot in the summer, freezing in the winter. We studied everything from repairing an entire piano to applying the exterior finishes. Assignments were challenging and I was worried that I might not pass them, so I stayed late every night, struggling to hone my skills. Many was the time I felt as though I’d set foot in the forest of my childhood nightmares, the one where if you got lost you’d never find your way back, and sometimes the darkness threatened to overwhelm me.

Despite all this, I still loved it. I never caught the fragrance of the forest wafting up from the pianos that I tuned myself, but I could never forget that first scent. I clung to its memory and somehow managed to complete the course. I couldn’t play the piano, didn’t have a particularly good ear, and yet I was able to tune the forty-ninth key, A above middle C, to 440 hertz. A mere two years of study, although it seemed such a long journey. By the end, I was able to fashion together the whole musical scale.