The Forest of Wool and Steel

by Natsu Miyashita

The gym usually resounded with students calling out during volleyball or basketball and the screeching and thudding of trainers on the maple-wood floors.

It was terrifying to think that no matter how hard I tried there was a chance that I might never make it to the end.

If a piano can bring to light the beauty that has become invisible to us, and give it audible form, then it is a miraculous instrument and I thrill to be its lowly servant.

And that’s the crux of it: it’s very limiting and stressful to work solely within the scope of what the client thinks they are after. The true pleasures of working as a tuner lie beyond that, beyond the simple embodiment of the client’s own mental conception of how the piano should sound.

Whenever we played our special chess game, shogi, at home I was better, but when we competed in contests in town he always beat me. It wasn’t as though he was holding back when we played at home. There are just people who are stronger in their play when it really counts, or who are consistently lucky in competitions.

It’s a lot more painful to be jealous of someone than to be the object of jealousy.

Everywhere you go there are unpleasant people who take pleasure in running roughshod over others’ feelings. Be it in a small village in the mountains, in a college in town, among our clients, even in our office, it makes no difference.

It doesn’t hurt so much to lose out on things if you never hoped for them in the first place. What really hurts is having things right there in front of you, and wanting them, and not being able to reach them.

It wasn’t a tool to help him avoid any horrors; it was the power to deal with them.

There’s no shortcut through the forest. The only way forward is to keep honing your skills, little bit by little bit.

Even if I was afraid of the future, the present was even more frightening.

‘You see, talent will out if you really love something. A tenacity, a fight in you that keeps you in the fray no matter what. Something like that. That’s the way I’ve come to think of it.’

It’s the same when you’re willing someone on to win a piano competition – it means you’re hoping another person is the loser. It’s hard to condemn a wish, though – it doesn’t mean it’s going to come true. And if it does, the wish-maker can’t be held responsible. Fruit falls from a tree whether I’m there to witness it or not. Somebody laughs, somebody cries.

Music is there to help us enjoy life, not as a means to outdo everyone else. Even if you do compete and a winner is picked – the person who enjoys himself the most is always the real winner.

The glistening of the world as the morning sun rises, the glowing as it sets – who can say which is better? The morning sun and evening sun are the very same sun, yet the form of their beauty differs. That’s what I figure, in any case.

An object that holds no value to many people can to someone else be utterly precious.

The desire to have a world-class pianist play your tuned piano in a concert hall may be a noble goal for some – but I fe...

‘Playing the piano is not how I’ll make a living,’ Kazune said. ‘It’s how I’ll make a life.’

I looked at Yuni’s solemn expression and thought: She isn’t giving up the piano at all. There are entrances to the forest all over. And there must be so many routes to walk through it.

Perhaps I hadn’t taken the wrong path after all. Even if it took time, even if there were detours, this was exactly the right path for me. I had thought there was nothing in the forest, nothing in the scenery around me, but now I knew: everything was there. It wasn’t that it was hidden, but that I simply hadn’t seen it.