“I would have protected us, even if you hadn’t gotten married.”
“That’s the problem,” she sighed. “You thought you could be a woman and a man rolled up into one, and you couldn’t at that age. Soon you’ll be old enough.” She turned her head and gazed out the window.
We arrived at Ueno station early in the morning and, after a fitful night of sleep on the train, were eager for a nap. I wanted to find a ryokan as we had on our trip to Akita, but my mother disagreed. We would stay in a business hotel near Ueno Park. When we arrived, we had to use a cramped shower for bathing in lieu of a nice hot spring, then slept for a few hours. When we woke, we each bought a bento lunch and ate in the park.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said to her. “I want to see the Ginza.”
“We’ll need to take the subway for that.”
“Don’t you know how?” I asked, for I still believed she could do almost anything, and indeed, she navigated the maps and the fares and soon we were standing in that fabled neighborhood, in front of the Mikimoto storefront where girls with white gloves had just begun to remove strands of pearls from the windows to put away for the evening. Nearby was a small café selling Parisian pastries. Men stopped to look at my mother—she was so beautiful—and I felt pride because she was mine.
“Let’s eat cake,” I said, steering her into Fujiya, where I ordered a mont blanc because I’d once overheard someone describe it on a train. She ordered an éclair.
“Is the cream fresh?” she asked the waitress.
“It’s been refrigerated.”
“Yes, but is it fresh?”
“I will ask.”
I smiled. Here we were in Tokyo and my mother knew how to behave with such dignity. Even here everyone deferred to her.
“Like this.” She showed me how to hold my fork. “Mmm. Isn’t it delicious?”
“Like the moon,” I said.
Later we walked along the perimeter of the grounds of the imperial palace; the actual castle was buried deep within a forest of trees. We craned our necks to see past the palace walls, hoping for a glimpse of the emperor, but of course he was probably fast asleep already. Now it was night and taxis whizzed by and neon filled the sky. “I wish it was always this way,” I sighed.
“When you are rich and famous, it will be,” she said. “You can hire maids to look after Mr. Horie and Mineko and Chieko, and I can be with you.” She said it like a challenge.
“So you do wish it could just be us.”
She paused, then smiled at me a little sadly. “It’s just us right now.”
In the morning, she took me to the school, whose campus was made up of an impressive collection of very Western-looking brick buildings that dated from the Meiji period. Together we completed my registration and paperwork, all of which took longer than expected, and this meant she did not have time to get me settled into my living quarters.
“I will call you,” she said as we said good-bye at the entrance to the dormitory.
“Can’t you take the next train?”
She shook her head. “Mineko needs my help with some sewing.” She touched my face. “Don’t cry. You will come home at the end of the term.”
I waved halfheartedly and turned so she would not see my tears.
The inside of the dorm was musty and smelled of rosin from violin bows, old tatami mats, and freshly laundered curtains. I pretended to sneeze and wipe my eyes from dust in case anyone saw me crying. Then I began to search for the room I would share with four other women. A familiar shape was sitting in the middle of the tatami floor when I slid open the door. The surprise was enough to stanch my tears.
“Hello.” The girl turned to look at me. While I stared at her, she smiled and asked, “Are you still stealing competitions?” It was Shinobu, the Korean girl from the competition in Akita.
I set my bags down in the corner of the room. For the next four years, my roommates and I would move low wooden desks onto the floor to study. At night, we would put the desks away and pull futons out of a cupboard and unfurl them onto the floor. I would be alone only when I practiced the piano or went to the toilet.
“Are you still flirting with judges?” I asked.
“I can’t help it if I am charming!”
“Where did you go to high school?”
“Kikuzato. My parents moved to Nagoya just for me.”
“To make sure you could get into university in Tokyo.”
“I’ve always known my future.” She grinned. “That’s why I never bother with fortune tellers.”
We became friends. Our bond was partly inevitable, for we discovered early on in the semester that we were outsiders: Shinobu because she was Korean, and I because I was from the country. Most of the girls were from the major cities: Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka. They were here at Geidai because their parents wanted polished daughters who would either capture the eye of wealthy and accomplished husbands, or who could go back to their fancy neighborhoods to teach music. To be from the countryside, as we were, was to be an outsider forever. “How,” asked our roommate Sachiko, a soprano from the Ginza district of Tokyo, “did you even become interested in music?” We were in the large communal dining hall eating off heavy tables that had been there since the Meiji period.
“Everyone likes music,” Shinobu said.
“Yes, but most people where you are from become farmers, don’t they?”
I tried to set my chopsticks down carefully, but they clattered and one rolled and fell to the floor. In Japan, a single chopstick is a bad omen. “You think you know what the countryside is from posters you see in train stations, don’t you? The world is not so well defined.”
“Yes, but how did you even find a decent teacher?”
“There are teachers everywhere,” I said.
“Yes, but the best teachers stay in the cities. They study here, like we are doing now, then go back to their neighborhoods to teach the next group of students. And if they do come from the countryside, they don’t go back. So, how did you ever find a good enough teacher to get into Geidai?”
I put my palms on the table to anchor my weight and began to stand up, but Shinobu put her hand on my knee and kept me in place. I looked at her, furious that she would prevent me from engaging Sachiko, but was startled to see her smiling that enchanting smile she’d used on the judges years ago in Akita. It was like being caught in a strong stage light and I was momentarily hypnotized into inaction.
“What you say is true, of course. Satomi may not have had access to the best teachers. But that is also why students from the countryside, like her, are generally of a better caliber. It is only truly gifted musicians who come from the outside to end up at Geidai,” she finished sweetly. “Satomi must be truly talented, or else she could never compete with you.”
That evening, as we ambled through the hallway back to our dorm room, she pulled me aside and told me that I would need to learn to work on my temper if I were to succeed in college. Could I not see, she asked, that Sachiko was a very literal girl, always playing everything note perfect and angry at herself if she missed a finger in a chord? “We must feel sorry for her,” Shinobu said. “It’s a terrible thing in life to be a limited person.”
“Is it true?” I asked impatiently.
“What?”
“That only the very talented students from the countryside end up at Geidai?”
She smiled. “They know that we will either fail miserably because we cannot adjust to their ways … because we get into fights”—she nodded meaningfully—“or that we will have something they can never have. They are afraid, Satomi.”
The question of talent was widely discussed at Geidai. It was the magical secret ingredient that separated all of the students and because it could not be meted out, its existence was questioned, and sometimes argued like the life of the gods themselves. That Shinobu and I were strange and accomplished was taken for granted. But it remained to be seen whether or not we would be put in one camp or th
e other: the group of general students destined for careers in teaching, or that rare breed who might actually be artists.
While there was plenty of speculation among the girls on the subject of talent, the teachers were unwilling to give any of us their formal blessing. I found this resistance to be troubling.
“Your teachers have indulged you and let you play only what you wanted,” my piano instructor Uchihara-sensei said to me. She was a tiny woman in her seventies, and age had made her more brittle than frail, like the fossilized twig of a tree. “If you intend to teach, you must be proficient in Bach.”
“I don’t intend to teach.”
“Neither did I when I was your age. Do you think you are better than I am?”
I considered this. It was more that I sensed a certain limitation in her character. The world, I suspected, would never embrace her the way it would embrace me. “I’d like to play Rachmaninoff,” I said. “I like the stories he tells. I’m going to be bored if I have to play even more Bach.”
She studied me, her eyes tiny, cold and dark as if they had been pressed from coal. “Perhaps next year, if you pay attention to me and pass your exams.”
Alone, I practiced my Bach preludes. In the company of my classmates, I studied music theory, art history, and literature. Outside, the cherry blossoms dissolved like sugar in the heavy rains of spring and a wave of fleshy green leaves exploded through Ueno Park, bringing the smell of nature in through my window. I worked my way through Uchihara-sensei’s lessons. I tried to listen to her. But I began to study the Lento from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 1 on my own. I indulged myself in the melodic lines, in the way the voices braided together like a conversation. I imagined my mother and me as we had been before her marriage, when we had lived in wild Kuma-ume.
In the dorm at night, I drew little sketches of Uchihara-sensei and me engaged in a lesson. I was usually a sad little pencil in the drawings, and Uchihara-sensei an eraser, struggling against a desire to rub out what I wrote, even as she tried to convince me to write even more on paper. One of my dormmates, Taki, was in the fine arts program and was studying portrait painting. She liked to wear a beret, as though she were in Paris, and I sometimes threw her into my cartoons as a little teacup with a cap on its head, admonishing us that our great battles were having no effect at all on the direction that art in Japan was now taking. I always drew Shinobu as a tattered novel, disinterestedly watching our antics from a bookshelf.
“You know,” Taki said to me, as she looked over my shoulder while I sketched, “you are a pretty good artist, for someone so untrained.”
“You are a pretty good artist too, for someone so untrained,” I replied.
“Hey!”
“I’m just kidding. See?” I held out a sheet of paper and pointed out how the intelligent teacup had once again saved the life of the hapless pencil stuck inside a trash can.
At the end of the semester, each music student performed in the recital hall, located just above the school’s administrative offices. The floor of the auditorium was weak, and even just one too many bodies on the second floor caused the ceiling over the offices to sag. It was not uncommon for some suit-attired woman to come marching in during a performance and demand that five people leave the audience, or risk collapsing the entire building.
“Come hear me play,” I told the other students. “I’m going to have a surprise.”
“You’re going to finally collapse the building?” someone asked.
“Something much more interesting than that,” I promised.
I did not even tell Shinobu what I intended to do. “Remember,” she advised, “you must be smart about how you work with other people here.”
“I know.”
She frowned. “I’m not sure that you’ve taken my lectures to heart.”
I was only somewhat disappointed when my mother phoned to say that she could not come to hear me play—Mineko needed her for some unspecified emergency—for the auditorium was full and two latecomers were turned away from the back of the room. I flexed my hands and prepared to play. I would show them an earthquake.
I dutifully fingered my way through Bach’s Prelude no. 1 in C Major, as Uchihara-sensei had expected. But when it came time for me to perform the Mozart Piano Sonata no. 5, I stretched my fingers and began the Rachmaninoff instead. I had known, of course, that this would be a surprise. Uchihara-sensei would not be pleased that I had made a program switch, but my strategy was simply to play so well that Uchihara-sensei would have no choice but to allow me to work on more Rachmaninoff next semester. When I finished playing, I stood up to take a bow. No one clapped as they had after the Bach. The room was silent, girls glancing at each other, unsure of what to do.
I strode from one end of the stage to the other, bowing the way my mother had trained me. Still silence. Then I began to worry. Even if what I had done was unexpected, the audience should have been moved. Just a little. I searched for Shinobu and found her sitting in the middle, as she had promised she would be. I smiled at her and she flinched. I continued to smile, willing her to lift her hands, and finally she began to clap, the sole person in the room to do so. A moment later, Taki joined in, and then the room filled with the warm, appreciative applause I had expected. I smiled, triumphantly, and exited the stage where Uchihara-sensei was waiting for me in the wings.
“I’m sorry,” I began, “it’s just that I wanted you to know that I could …”
“Sloppy,” she declared, before rattling off like an old crab.
I rolled my eyes. Of course I had done something rather unusual, but I certainly hadn’t been sloppy. Eventually, the old woman would see this.
By the time I had gathered my things and made my way down into the audience area where Shinobu and Taki were waiting, most everyone else had left the auditorium, though I could still hear the excited rumble of gossiping voices tumbling down the stairs.
“I wish,” Shinobu sighed, “that you had told me what you were going to do. I would have advised you to use the Rachmaninoff as an encore. Satomi, what if you aren’t invited back next semester?”
“Of course I’ll be invited back,” I scoffed.
“They could fail you.”
“But I didn’t fail,” I said. “The truth is the truth.”
We began to wend our way toward the exit. “You know I admire your spirit.” Shinobu shook her head. “I understand it, really. But now you’ve made Uchihara-sensei look bad. The other teachers will say that she cannot control you.” Shinobu began then to detail a plan for how I was to extricate myself from the very grave situation that I was in. Her ideas involved writing letters and appealing to different teachers in the music department and much bowing, which she herself would coach me to do correctly. But I only half listened, for something had caught my eye. Rising out of one of the auditorium seats like a ghostly wisp of fog now materializing into human form was an older woman wearing a black felt cloche fitted close around her temples. I stopped walking. The woman was staring at me, and though I could not place where I might have met her, there was something familiar about her bearing.
She smiled, a slow, liquid expression that spread from her lips to her eyes and gave them warmth. I smiled back.
“They say that you are very daring,” the lady said. Her voice, though notched with age, was confident and rich. It was a voice that had spoken of many things and without much fear through the years.
“Thank you.”
“They say that what you have done is problematic.”
I saw that she had a cane and as she began to shuffle at a slow but determined pace, I moved to help her. It hurt me to see someone who carried such an air of dignity about her moving with so much difficulty. But Shinobu gripped my wrist and kept me in place.
The older woman said, “The best students always know when they need a new teacher. And they also know when they no longer need any teacher at all.” She pulled a small piece of paper out of her coat pocket with her free hand. “Call if
you like.” She smiled one more time, then bent her head to focus on her steps. We heard her slowly shuffling along and, out of respect for her age, waited for the sound to fade away before we too departed the hall.
“Who was that?” Taki finally asked.
I did not recognize the name and handed the sheet of paper over to Shinobu. “She wrote that my wrists are too stiff.”
“It’s Rie Sanada,” Shinobu breathed.
“Who?”
“She left you her phone number.”
“But you aren’t supposed to take lessons off campus,” Taki noted.
Shinobu tossed me a look and gave her head a barely perceptible shake. “No,” she said. “We aren’t.” Then she linked her arms in ours and led us back to the dormitory.
All during the second semester of that first year, I’d looked forward to the train ride from Tokyo to Hachinohe for the New Year holiday. I knew it would be long and tiring, and then I’d have to deal with Mineko once I finally arrived at my destination, but I was looking forward to seeing the passengers and the scenery change. And indeed, once I started my journey home, I loved having the sense that I was someone with somewhere very, very far to go. It made me feel that my own story was particularly important again.
I sat in my most college-girl-looking outfit possible, a pleated skirt and a fitted sweater that I’d bought with money Mr. Horie had sent to me, and a dramatic pair of large gloves I’d found in Ameyoko, a flea market. The gloves, or rather the gauntlets, were leather, and therefore obviously imported from the West. People gave me a wide berth, though I was very happy to tell the one person who asked me where I had gotten those oversized things that I was a pianist, and that protecting my hands at all times was of utmost importance. The news spread throughout the train, and thereafter, when people walked past me to go to the bathroom or to look for the bento seller, they gave me little smiles, which I ignored, preferring to stare haughtily out the window.
At Hitachi station, there was the usual transfer of passengers and the new passengers avoided sitting next to me because of my gloves. I was surprised when a young man plopped down in the seat opposite me, grinning as though we’d met long ago and had finally been reunited. I snuck a look at him. He was handsome in that self-aware way, with round eyes and full lips and a straight nose. Immediately I didn’t trust him. I always assumed that overconfident and good-looking boys thought they could get away with things, and planned to.
Picking Bones from Ash Page 5
