How many hours do people waste in a lifetime over this sort of action?
Do I mean people, or do I mean normal people, people who aren’t me?
I am sitting on a black, rectangular piano stool that I have put in front of my gas stove. There are round knobs on both sides of the stool that subtly adjust its height. The bit under my bum is a plump cushion like a blackboard eraser—it makes me feel quite tall. Soon after moving, I got my sister to send this stool over from our parents’ house. It was my third move, this time from Chiba to Kyoto, and I arrived with little more than the clothes on my back. And now this stool. It’s packed full of all my piano-learning history: the six short years of elementary school when I was taking piano lessons, quitting before I could play Burgmüller’s Arabesque consistently without stumbling. Now this stool is here, snug against the stove in my cheap Kyoto apartment.
I watch the exterior of an aluminium pot as I turn and re-turn the knobs on both sides of the stool. Water, which until a few minutes ago had been held within the pipes, and fishy pieces of dried bonito, which had been held within a ziplock bag, have both gone into the pot, and the pot put on a flame. Clouds of steam surge up from the boiling water—it will be a minute before the bonito infuses the water into stock.
“It’s useless,” I whisper, affecting a Kyoto dialect, and I rest my cheek on my hand.
Useless.
It’s times like these when I say “normal people," think "normal people."
What I want to convey when I say “normal” is what the people who are not submerged in a new religion are in relation to someone like my mother, who is up to her eyeballs in the stuff. What the people who hold new religions in innocent loathing and denial are to someone who believes in that phrase—“new religions”.
*
After extricating my cheek from my palm and fixing my posture, I face the glow of the small light of the ventilator fan. I hold my hand towards it, open, then closed, open, then closed. I uncross my thighs and bring my feet up to sit cross-legged on top of the stool. I move the palm that has been facing the light up to my face, so close that it fills my entire vision. Frowning, I appraise the lines, those traces—lines so thin I can barely see them—on the palm. Age, annual income, upbringing, sex, what food you like and dislike, the number of people you have fallen in love with, how long you’ve had a smartphone, how long you had a brick phone, or if you had one at all. It’s all there, in every line, in every wrinkle that gets chiselled in through the repetitions of the day-to-day. I may not understand tarot or feng shui or astrology very well, but of all of them, palm reading is the only form of divination I can bring myself to believe in. Whether palm reading or some other method, in the end I think they might all be looking at the same thing. The repetitions of the day-to-day. The evidence of a life.
I never grew to like piano. I was the sort of kid who would seize the manga from the bookshelves in the corner of the classroom, some Doraemon or Crayon Shin-Chan, crawl under the grand piano and get lost in reading. Piano lessons weren’t so much lessons to learn piano as they were a game of cat and mouse with my teacher. Once, as my exasperated teacher hauled me from beneath the piano, I whacked my head halfway out and the teacher came to my house to apologize. There was a heavy air of unappeased uncertainty between my parents and my teacher—ought I to apologize for something? What apology was I due? I remember the house was deathly quiet. I wonder how that teacher is getting on.
Now, I send my thoughts out in earnest apology, but I also look back at that time fondly. When I was huddled under the piano reading, I could lose an eternity. Had I never hidden myself away under the piano, I might have never known that transcendence. Once you are removed from the specific circumstances that created specific moments, they do not naturally occur a second time. Through the stacking and building and adding and accruing of these separate occurrences, the everyday becomes everyday; they are etched into us as memories, like wrinkles.
*
There are masses of thin, horizontal lines that threaten to drown out the deep, long life line stretching from the midpoint between the joints of my thumb and forefinger, heading down towards my wrist. Is this a good omen or a bad omen, I wonder, feeling like a palm reader. The water in the pot has come to the boil. In all the time I learned piano, right up until I quit, the only praise I ever received was for the shape of my hands. Perhaps there was nothing else to praise. I stand up and turn the gas down so low it looks like the flame might disappear. I take the lid off the metal pot, pick out the pieces of fish with my cooking chopsticks and discard them in the sink. I discard them, over and over, until they’re all gone.
My tightly tensed hands are supple, stretch wide, and don’t take up needless space. My thumb and little finger can comfortably extend over an octave and make an arch like a rainbow above the keyboard. I bring that picture to mind. As I reminisce, I put the dried seaweed in the pot, dissolve miso in a ladle and add it to the broth before closing the lid again. I sit once more on the seat and close my eyes. I’m a little sleepy. At two o’clock, the dead of night, I had felt peckish and from inside my futon decided to make miso soup. Now, it’s been maybe forty-five minutes. I sway my body from side to side so that I don’t fall asleep. I had woken to a hunger not worth fighting and now I’m getting sleepy before that hunger is satisfied—what the hell! I let out a yawn that causes the flame to waver. A wisp of steam leaks from the pot.
When I believed in my mother and the things she believed, I imitated her and held my hands out toward every conceivable thing. Cup noodles, teddy bears, mosquito coils, my mother’s brow, mobile phones, my sister’s rear, beer cans, manicures. I thought that would make everything good. And the bad things, I sincerely believed, would all be purified by an invisible light emanating from my hands.
Then at some point—in the time I spent chatting with friends, reading manga, moving my body, developing crushes, getting accepted and rejected—I became able to choose for myself what I believed in. What my mother believed was no longer what I believed.
“Are you not my child?”
“Are you a child of God?”
“Be grateful.”
“And be penitent.”
“Be thankful for everything.”
“Because God has forgiven you for all the sins of your past life.”
“Be grateful.”
“All your unhappiness and happiness is God’s doing.”
“Gratitude.”
All those words like coarse sand from my mother’s mouth.
Between me and my mother, the sand has quietly become a wall.
Eyes closed, I spread both my arms wide and move them in a gentle waving motion. I hum a tune. Burgmüller’s Arabesque. I can no longer move my fingers across a keyboard along with the score, but I can let the music out with my voice whenever I like. Even now, my throat can produce that nostalgic melody.
I continue to move my arms in time with my voice, and all the ingredients in the pot mix and mingle together, and the dried seaweed expands and floats like a flag waving in the wind. Now, I am not holding my hands to anything. They’re moving. Just moving.
