The Piano Man (Iwaoi)

Chapter 6

        Tooru couldn't play very complex things, and he couldn't play for very long, but he found rather quickly that it wasn't too difficult to compose. He had only dabbled in composing before; he had never been able to take it seriously, devote a lot of time to it, because he'd always spent the majority of his days practicing. But he bought a special composition notebook, with special lined paper, that he used to work on his very first real composition. It was his last connection to the world of music into which he had poured his entire soul, his last connection to the world he had worked so hard to perfect. He knew so much about that world, after all. Could hear a piece and tell immediately what key it was in, what the time signature it was, categorize it or pronounce proudly that it had no category (such were the pieces that he so loved playing). So he let his mind start to work harder than his fingers, a new and challenging adventure—he had to think about which notes came next, and why, instead of just relying on the true and tried muscle memory in his fingers. He wrote, rewrote, rewrote again the first few bars of this piece. Going in, he had expected it to come naturally to him, but he was wrong. Which, in retrospect, wasn't surprising in the slightest. Playing piano initially hadn't come naturally to him, either. It was one of his strongest points: passion and hard-work. So he listened to a lot of music, even more than usual, and he watched YouTube videos about composing that made him feel like he was taking music theory classes again. In the corner of the large, open piano room of his house (he had an entire room dedicated to it), there grew a pile of crumpled up papers with abandoned black notes sketched in clumsy handwriting.

        He wanted to compose something for Hajime.

        Sometimes, when he sat on the piano and gently played the chords from the key he wanted to compose in, his fingers would start playing on their own. He would delve into a nocturne, a mazurka, a serenade that he hadn't meant to play, and suddenly he would be filling his lonely, empty house with the sad music that he so longed to play in front of an audience again. Because, as everybody said, he could change lives with his music. People swore by his performances, his recordings, the ways that he moved their hearts. Old men who hadn't cried in decades burst into tears when they heard his performances. In the middle of the piece, though, he would catch himself, and gently lift his hands from the desperate white and black keys. Lay them in his lap. Stare at the piano for a long, long time, until the horrible pit in his stomach subsided, and he picked up his perfectly sharpened pencil and continued sketching.

        He talked to Hajime Iwaizumi a lot. They exchanged text messages regularly, though sometimes Tooru would go hours without a response—usually it was something along the lines of, "Sorry, had a brutal investigation today," or, "The victim's having a rough time of it," or, "Just finished lunch, I'll call you later."

        The dings on his phone were the highlights of Tooru's day. They dragged him out of bed in the morning and reminded him to eat, drink water, shower, get out of bed and stretch his legs. Go out for walks, shave, make dentist appointments and haircut appointments and buy groceries. Just the knowledge that one of these days, when Hajime was finally free, he would come see him in these end-of-the-earth Tokyo suburbs, and Tooru could give him a tour of the house and play something for him on the piano. And in the midst of it all he would receive phone calls that made him blush like a child and walk around the big empty house in his pale bare feet, biting his lower lip and holding the phone as still as he could.

        "How was your day?"

        "Rough. I'm gonna start getting gray hairs."

        "That's all right. I'm really good with hair. I can always dye it for you."

        "And you? How was your day?"

        "Boring."

        "Get a dog or something."