‘When a pianist plays the piano,’ he said, ‘he expresses everything in his imagination through the tone of his music. To switch it around, a pianist is unable to play any sound that does not already exist within him – but the piano enables his skill and technique to come out loud and clear.’ Mr Akino stared at me now, his expression unusually grave. He stuffed the earplug back in his left ear, indicating the end of the conversation.

I understood him to mean that Mr Itadori’s tuning was to be revered. Truly, his gift was to arrange the soundscape of a piano so that its music would shine light into the shadows, revealing even those things that would rather remain out of sight.

Perhaps it was a piano tuned by Mr Itadori that had led Mr Akino himself to give up on his dreams of a career as a pianist. Possibly Mr Akino imagined that Mr Itadori had done this intentionally.

I viewed Mr Itadori as the ideal, the kind of tuner I wanted to become, but Mr Akino must have viewed him through different eyes.

The Answer Is in the Stars

Polishing my tuning hammer, I sat at my desk in the office waiting for my next appointment.

‘Here you are,’ Miss Kitagawa said, placing a cup of tea on my desk.

‘Oh, thank you very much.’

Miss Kitagawa watched intently as I folded up the cloth I’d been using to polish the tuning hammer and set it aside.

‘Your tuning tools always look so immaculate, Tomura-kun.’ She seemed genuinely impressed. ‘You’ve been here two years now?’

‘That’s right.’ I would soon be starting my third year. The tuning hammer she was admiring was the seasoned tool Mr Itadori had given me all that time ago.

‘When you first came here, Tomura-kun, and I heard you were born and raised in the mountains, it made sense to me. You seemed selfless, gentle, straightforward, and for better or for worse, the sort of person who doesn’t stand out. You didn’t strike me as the cheerful type either. I couldn’t picture what kind of work you’d do here as a tuner since you don’t seem to show a strong preference for anything, one way or the other.’

No strong preference – she was right about that. When I arrived in town to attend sixth-form college I realized for the first time that I’d never had any strong likes or dislikes about anything at all. My peers seemed to know about all kinds of things and had strong opinions about them. I alone was non-committal. In the mountains, the information and knowledge we could get hold of was limited. Compared to the town, living there took a lot more time and effort, and there were probably many aspects of that life that made us less picky about every little thing.