The Forest of Wool and Steel

by Natsu Miyashita

  The Forest of Wool and Steel

  Natsu Miyashita

  Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

  Contents

  I An Introduction to Piano Tuning

  II Beginner’s Level at Best

  III Not Quite Intermediate

  IV Far from Advanced

  V A Master Class

  About the Authors

  NATSU MIYASHITA was born in Fukui Prefecture on Honshu island, Japan, in 1967. She has had a lifelong passion for reading and writing and has played the piano since she was very young. The Forest of Wool and Steel has won several prizes in Japan – including the prestigious Japan Booksellers’ Award, in which booksellers vote for the title they most enjoy selling in store – and became a bestseller. It has also been turned into a popular Japanese film directed by Kojiro Hashimoto and starring Kento Yamazaki.

  PHILIP GABRIEL is an experienced translator from Japanese, and best known for his translation work with Haruki Murakami.

  I

  An Introduction to Piano Tuning

  Enter the Forest

  I inhale the scent of a forest close by. I can smell the earthy fragrance of autumn as night falls, the leaves gently rustling. I can feel the damp air of dusk descending.

  The forest is not there. It is in my mind’s eye. Because right now I’m standing in the corner of a deserted school gym at the end of the day. I’m a lower-sixth student and I’ve just accompanied a man with a large briefcase into the building.

  In front of me is a black grand piano, a little grubby in places where it needs a polish. The lid is open. The man stands beside it. He glances over at me, but we both remain silent. He gently presses down on the keys and the scent of warm earth and whispering leaves rises up in my mind, drifting from beneath the open lid of the piano.

  Night has deepened. I am seventeen.

  What if I hadn’t lingered in the classroom after school that day? What if the teacher hadn’t chosen me to help? I’ll never know. The second term of the year. Midterm exams were in full swing with after-school clubs suspended in favour of study and sleep, the corridors cool and still. I didn’t feel like going back to the boarding house where I lived alone, and had planned to visit the school library.

  ‘Sorry about this, Tomura,’ Mr Kubota had said, ‘but we have a staff meeting so I’ll be busy. We’re expecting a visitor at four o’clock. You just need to show him to the gym.’

  I was often asked favours. People seemed to feel comfortable asking me. Perhaps I looked like an easy-going type, or perhaps I was just always available. It’s true I had plenty of spare time. And on the horizon, I had only graduation and the search for a job to look forward to. This is what was filling my mind at the time, though there must have been other things, too.

  The errands I ran at school were never serious ones – important people did those. Ordinary work was for ordinary people. I assumed that the visitor that day fell into this category.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  ‘A tuner,’ Mr Kabuto said.

  I’d never heard this word before, and thought it might relate to the air conditioning.

  I had more school tests the next day so I buried my head in a history book for a while, before heading over to the entrance. A man in a brown jacket was waiting, a large case in one hand.

  ‘Are you here for the air conditioning?’ I asked, opening the door wide for him.

  ‘My name is Itadori. I’m from the Eto Music Shop.’

  I hesitated, momentarily confused.

  ‘I hear that Mr Kubota has a staff meeting today,’ the man said. ‘So, if you’d be kind enough to show me where the piano is?’

  I nodded, placing the brown slippers we used for visitors on the floor in front of him.

  I wondered fleetingly what he was going to do to the piano, although to be honest I wasn’t that bothered. ‘Please follow me,’ I said, leading him down the corridor and noticing how very heavy his briefcase looked. What on earth might he keep in there? I walked him over to the piano in the corner of the gym. He laid his bag carefully on the floor and nodded to me. My cue, I thought, to leave. I turned to go.

  The gym usually resounded with students calling out during volleyball or basketball and the screeching and thudding of trainers on the maple-wood floors. At this hour it lay quiet. Evening light poured in through the high windows, bathing the whirling eddies of dust in a yellow glow.

  As I made my way back down the corridor, the sound of the piano halted my step. It was mellow and rhythmic. I took a breath and listened again. A repeated clanging and twanging, higher then lower, echoed in the gym. It is hard to describe. But my soul was suddenly filled with a nostalgia and longing – and something else I couldn’t quite identify. I was taken aback. I crept quietly towards the gym and peeked my head through the door as the man went about his business. Feeling braver, I came closer. The man continued industriously, knocking and twanging. He moved around the piano and carefully lifted the huge black wing of the lid, propped it on the support stand, and pressed a few more keys.

  It was then that I smelled the unmistakable scent of the forest at nightfall, felt I was on the very cusp of setting foot inside. I considered entering, but resisted. The forest after dark is dangerous, after all – or so children’s stories tell us.

  On the gym floor his large briefcase lay open to reveal a set of tools, the like of which I’d never seen before. What he was planning to do with them I had no idea, and suddenly I burned with the need to know. Questions pressed and whirled in my mind. I had no idea how to put my curiosity into words, still regret even now not having asked anything at all. I’ve revisited that scene so many times since. If I had spoken up then, I wouldn’t have had to spend so much of my life in search of the answers.

  I looked on, remaining perfectly still and silent, not wanting to distract this man from his conscientious work. In that moment, the piano appeared utterly majestic, awesome in its near-perfection. I’d listened to smaller pianos so often in my junior school days, and had sung along with them. But a grand piano like this, I had never heard, and now I saw it in a completely new light. With its great black wing flung open and its insides exposed, it seemed to offer up an intimacy. Not only was it the first time I’d heard such a sound, but it was the first time I had been so moved to my very bones.

  It was the scent of a forest on an autumn night. In for the long haul, I placed my satchel on the floor and watched intently. Two hours passed without my noticing. The time of year – indeed the time of day – came into sharper focus. Early September, six o’clock on a crisp, clear evening. Some light still lingered from the town, but here in this secluded mountain village, the trees cut off the last of the sun. As the sound – soft, warm, deep, repetitive – continued to spill from the piano, I sensed the nocturnal forest creatures crouching silently nearby with bated breath.

  ‘This piano’s pretty old,’ said the man eventually. ‘It has a very gentle tone.’

  I nodded, although I wasn’t sure what he meant. Was this a good thing?

  ‘It’s a very fine piano indeed,’ he said.

  I nodded again.

  ‘Must be because the mountains and fields were better, back in the day.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  He wiped the black piano slowly with a soft cloth.

  ‘Sheep in the old days ate better grass in the mountains and fields.’

  An image drifted into my mind of the sheep, heads bent, leisurely cropping the pasture near the mountain home where I grew up.

  ‘They used plenty of felt made from the wool of good sheep that grazed on healthy grass. Can’t make decent hammers like this any longer.’

  I had no idea what h
e was talking about. ‘What do hammers have to do with pianos?’

  The man gave me a look, then a faint smile broke on to his face. ‘There are lots of hammers inside a piano.’

  I couldn’t imagine this at all.

  ‘Would you like to see?’ he asked, and I moved closer. ‘When you hit a key like this …’ Tooo–nn. The sound rang out in the big airy gym. A part inside the piano lifted up and knocked against a line. ‘See, this hammer here strikes a string, and the hammer itself is made of felt.’

  The same sound resonated again: tooo–nn, tooo–nn. I couldn’t tell if that was a gentle tone or not. But in the forest, near the beginning of September, around six in the evening, it was now starting to get dark.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s so much clearer than before,’ I replied.

  ‘What is much clearer?’

  ‘The scenery of the sound.’

  The picture that it conjured was now so vivid in my mind, even more so than when he first touched the keys.

  ‘Could the wood they use in pianos possibly be pine?’ I asked.

  The man gave a slight nod.

  ‘It’s from a tree called spruce,’ he said. ‘A type of pine.’

  My confidence growing, I asked, ‘Could this by any chance be from pine trees cut down in the Daisetsuzan mountain range?’

  The dark forest balancing on the flanks of those mountains – the image and sounds resonated in my very soul.

  ‘Actually it’s from foreign trees. From North America, I believe.’

  Oh. So much for what I’d imagined.

  The man heaved up the piano lid and closed it carefully. Then he continued to buff up the shine with a soft cloth.

  ‘I imagine you play?’ he asked.

  His voice was soothing and I wished with all my heart that I could respond with a yes. How wonderful it would be to play the piano, and express the sounds of the forest, the night, all manner of beautiful things.

  ‘No, actually, I don’t.’

  I’d never even touched a piano.

  ‘But you like pianos, don’t you?’

  Did I? I wasn’t sure. Only today had I become properly aware of this instrument, for the first time in my life.

  He didn’t seem to mind my reticence. He finished his polishing, stowed away the cloth, and quietly snapped shut the lid of his case. Turning again to face me, he took a business card from the pocket of his brown jacket and placed it in my hand. ‘If you fancy it, feel free to come and take a look at our pianos.’

  Soichiro Itadori, Piano Tuner

  ‘Can I really?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Mr Itadori nodded, smiling.

  I couldn’t forget that encounter. And one day I did go to visit the music shop.

  As I arrived, Mr Itadori was heading off to a client’s home, so I walked out into the car park with him and attempted a direct appeal. ‘Will you take me on as your apprentice? Please?’

  Mr Itadori neither laughed nor showed any surprise. He looked me in the eye, an inscrutable expression on his face. Then, appearing to have come to some sort of decision, he placed his case on the ground, took out a notebook and scribbled in it with a ballpoint, ripped out the page and handed it to me.

  It was the name of a school.

  ‘I’m just a lowly piano tuner,’ he said. ‘I’m not in a position to take on an apprentice. If you’re serious about studying tuning, I recommend this place.’

  And so it was that I graduated from school and convinced my parents to let me go to this place for specialist training. How much my family understood about it all, I still don’t know. The village in Hokkaido where I was born and raised offered only basic schooling, and once children finished compulsory education they tended to leave the mountains for the big cities. Some of the mountain children flourished away from home, while others felt overwhelmed by the large colleges and bustling crowds. Some would eventually drift back to the mountains, others would disappear for ever. Me? Well, I chanced upon the forest – an extraordinary place that the piano opened up to me – and I couldn’t return to mountain life.

  At eighteen, I left the mountains of Hokkaido for the first time in my life. The training course was based in a piano factory on Honshu – Japan’s main island – and for two years I was one of only seven students, learning the techniques of tuning from morning till night. Classes were held in a warehouse of sorts, so it was blisteringly hot in the summer, freezing in the winter. We studied everything from repairing an entire piano to applying the exterior finishes. Assignments were challenging and I was worried that I might not pass them, so I stayed late every night, struggling to hone my skills. Many was the time I felt as though I’d set foot in the forest of my childhood nightmares, the one where if you got lost you’d never find your way back, and sometimes the darkness threatened to overwhelm me.

  Despite all this, I still loved it. I never caught the fragrance of the forest wafting up from the pianos that I tuned myself, but I could never forget that first scent. I clung to its memory and somehow managed to complete the course. I couldn’t play the piano, didn’t have a particularly good ear, and yet I was able to tune the forty-ninth key, A above middle C, to 440 hertz. A mere two years of study, although it seemed such a long journey. By the end, I was able to fashion together the whole musical scale.

  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.’

  My efforts so far had been exactly that: a tremendous, dizzying amount of slow and steady. I was pleased that Mr Itadori was concerned about me, but I needed more. I ran
after him as he was nearing the door.

  ‘But how should I be slow and steady? How do you do slow and steady the right way?’ I stood in his way, trying to catch my breath.

  Mr Itadori gave me a quizzical look. ‘There’s no standard in this job that tells you if something is right or not,’ he said. ‘Best to be wary of that word “right”.’

  His friendly round face nodded a few times, as though in agreement with himself. He pushed open the door that led out to the car park. ‘Just take everything as it comes, slow and steady.’

  I lingered and held the door for him, wanting to make sure he had no other gems of wisdom to offer.

  ‘Don’t try to run before you can walk,’ he said.

  So slowly and steadily, whenever I had the chance, I would tune the pianos in the showroom. One piano per day. After tuning all six I’d go back to the first and retune it, changing the pitch. It’d be at least six months more before I’d be allowed to tune a client’s piano by myself, but to my comfort I learned that my predecessor had taken even longer. He’d been with the company for a year and a half before being let loose on clients’ personal instruments.

  It was Mr Yanagi, my senior in the firm by seven years, who had filled me in. ‘That student had done the full course at a piano tuners’ training school,’ he said. ‘Some people are just better suited to it than others.’

  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.

  ‘What’s important for a tuner is more than just your actual tuning technique,’ Mr Yanagi said, patting my arm with his stubby-fingered hand.

  I wasn’t confident of my own technique. I’d graduated from a rigorous training course, but had only just mastered the basics. When I had to work on a piano that hadn’t been properly maintained, the best I could manage was to rearrange the frequency of the discordant sounds and align the scales. No one would ever call my results beautiful. This was all I was capable of and it gave me sleepless nights. With no conviction in even my most basic skills, there was no way I could accomplish the finer aspects of tuning.