Mr Yanagi had used a restaurant metaphor once. He’d described how a chef, since he doesn’t know who is going to eat the dish, will go to great lengths to make sure anyone tasting it will be delighted from the very first bite. But if you do know who is going to eat it, you can target that person’s preferences and give them the flavours they prefer. Tuning is the same. If you know the person who will play the piano, you can tune it to produce the optimal sound for them, with the whole palette of tonal colours that particular person most wants in their instrument.

A single magpie flutters in and comes to rest in a forest of spruce.

I tuned the piano in the showroom with Kazune’s playing in mind, doing it for the sake of the piano that she would play, now that she had decided to turn professional.

It Only Takes Ten Thousand

From that day, I started going out on increasing numbers of tuning jobs on my own, and gradually gathered a number of repeat customers.

I grew familiar with the homes I visited. Not the houses so much or the clients, but the pianos. Oh, I’d think. I’d open up the black lid and see clear traces of a previous tuning I’d done. It felt like staring at my reflection in a mirror. What I’d had in mind, what I’d been aiming for, what I’d accomplished. I was amazed how I could see it all, reflected back.

I’m not that sociable or friendly, but with a piano I could feel a closeness I lacked with people. How have you been? I wanted to say aloud. It’s been a while. That I felt that way made sense, since a part of me remained behind within each piano.

Sometimes it felt as if a piano that had been all prim and stiff a year earlier, was now opening up a little, drawing closer to me, and the same held true for the clients. Those who had stuck close by on my previous visit, watching my every move as I worked, now left me to my own devices.

‘All thanks to you, I now regard my piano as a very fine instrument indeed.’ This came from an elderly lady whose piano I had tuned on one of my first appointments of the day. ‘It makes me so happy to see how carefully, how lovingly, you treat it,’ she added.

I felt a little embarrassed. ‘No, please, I should thank you for allowing me to work on it,’ I told her.

She wasn’t praising the sound I’d created, but at this point in my career any words of praise still felt wholly unmerited.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy hearing them. I loaded my tools into the little car and drove back to the office quite full of myself.