Along with my six classmates I managed to graduate, then returned to the city near my hometown and landed a job in a music shop – the very same place where Mr Itadori worked. I was in luck as another piano tuner had just moved on.

The Eto Music Shop was a small establishment – four tuners, a receptionist, a handful of people in admin and sales – and dealt primarily in pianos. The head of the company, Mr Eto, was rarely around.

I spent the first six months in training, answering the phones, managing the music classes, handling customers on the shop floor.

On the ground floor was the showroom with six pianos (four upright, two grand), a corner where we sold sheet music and books, two rooms for private lessons, and a smart little auditorium for intimate recitals. Most of the time I was in the office on the first floor.

The days were so hectic it was only at night that I got the chance to practise my tuning. When everyone else had gone home, I opened up the lid of a piano – my favourite being the smallest of the uprights in a rich, reddish mahogany – and an exquisite silence would settle over the room. I felt my consciousness expand, and yet there was a folding inwards, too. I struck the tuning fork, my nerves entirely focused and alert.

I had no trouble tuning the strings, yet something still felt off-kilter. I just couldn’t make sense of the sound vibrations. The numerical values met the required specs when I measured them with my tuning fork, but I could still hear them wavering. Piano tuners do so much more than you might think – it’s not simply a case of reaching a particular fixed set of pitches, but of understanding the vibrations and interactions among and between the notes. And this was where I found myself stuck. It felt as though I was in a pool and struggling, barely managing to tread water instead of gliding through with sure strokes. Every night it felt the same.

I didn’t see Mr Itadori much. He was rarely in the office, often out tuning pianos in concert halls or tuning the instruments of a whole list of customers in their homes. He’d go directly to visit his clients then head straight home at the end of the day, so sometimes whole weeks passed without my seeing him.

I desperately wanted to watch him in action tuning a piano and for him to give me some technical pointers, but more than that I wanted to hear how he would refine the timbre of a piano and the colour of its tone. My feelings must have shown, for one day, just as he was leaving for an appointment, he placed his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘There’s no rush. Take it slow and steady. Slow and steady.’