MONKEY Vol 4: Music

Here is a preview from MONKEY New Writing from Japan, volume 4. Our theme this year is MUSIC.

Transformers: Pianos
Kaori Fujino
translated by Laurel Taylor

I think sometimes things just don’t work out. If they did, people like me and my sister would have gotten the short end of the stick. Or people like my mom.
My sister says, “Pianos aren’t very smart, are they?” But maybe we have the wrong idea.

The pianos are biting back. They’ve decided to start a war with humanity. Why would they do something like that, you ask. Isn’t it obvious? For revenge.
Me and my sister have this idea that up till now the pianos have had to put up with all sorts of things. Take our family piano, for example.
Our upright used to be Mom’s. Our great-grandfather bought it for her when she was little. He had this idea that proper young ladies should learn piano.
But Mom isn’t a proper young lady, and she didn’t have any talent for piano. Me and my sister know. Mom is completely tone deaf. You wouldn’t know it from the way she talks, but when she sings, her voice can never settle on a note, it’s all over the place. Like this tanker truck I saw in a movie once, when its tires skidded. No sense of rhythm either. She mows down pickup notes, triple meter, semitones, and more, sweeping everything along by force. By the time she’s done singing, all the rules have lost meaning and been bowled down into a giant hole made specifically for their disposal, and there they wait to be buried.
A person like that could never play piano. But in spite of this, Mom went to lessons for five whole years before she quit. The keyboard lid stayed closed, gathering piles of dust, dictionaries, and textbooks. Every now and then a stray cat snuck in and sprawled on top of the piano.
The situation only got worse once me and my sister started to play.
Neither of us is tone deaf, but we grew up hearing Mom’s lullabies and humming, so any piano talent we ever had was burned to a crisp long ago.
Even so, Mom brought the piano from her parents’ house and enshrined it on a carpet in the narrow tatami room in our apartment. She said she thought it would be cute to see us two little girls playing duets. In matching poofy white dresses with ribbons tied at our waists. The ribbon would be . . . let’s see, a more mature blue for you, pink for your sister.
“Do you want to play piano?” she asked.
“Yeah!” we answered. The dresses had us hooked.
Mom took immediate action. We only found out we’d actually been enrolled in piano lessons after all the paperwork was already done. For a while, Mom held on to the hope that at least one of us would become a professional pianist.
Every day me and my sister were chased into the tatami room and forced to practice. I was especially bad. Mom ordered me to make sure my sister practiced an hour first before taking another full hour to practice myself. Once my sister started school, it was also my job to make her run back home without any dawdling.
My sister sucked. She had no desire to improve, and she hated playing, so being terrible didn’t bother her. She didn’t play with her fingertips—instead she pushed the keys with the pads of her fingers full on the ivories, even though the teacher told her over and over to stop. She also played using the outside edges of her pinky fingers, which made her soft toddler bones curl inward. This bothered Mom, who started trying to pinch those fingers flat whenever we were watching TV, but even that didn’t bother my sister. What did bother her was me giving her orders about anything and everything.
The second her fingers stumbled, I shouted, “Wrong!” I’d push her aside and sit on the bench, show her how to play the spot the right way, and then go even further, playing more and more of what came next. I hated piano too, but I was desperate to get good enough to make a fool out of her. I usually managed to play with the proper form, and my pinkies were thicker and stronger than hers, so they stayed straight and beautiful.
I never knew the joy of music. But in those moments I loved it, loved the piano.
Playing through my sister’s tantrums, all her screeching and blubbering, felt absurdly good. It was different from when I was just practicing or playing for my teacher. In order to defeat my sister’s wailing, my body knew what it had to do. I obeyed with pleasure, letting everything ripple down my two arms through my elbows and out. When I did, my fingers transferred all that power to the keyboard, and the keys responded by sinking down deeper than ever. I felt the melody twine around my own muscles. I felt the rhythm squeeze my muscles until they tingled.
Of course my happiness didn’t last long. Just a moment, really.
Soon enough, my sister, snot dripping from her nose, would grab at me or the keyboard. She’d wrap herself around my waist and drag me off the bench or throw herself at the keys, sending up sounds almost like modern music. I kicked at her as I kept trying to play with all my might, but in the end our fingers wound up being used to push and pull at shoulders or chests or hair, and we made a fitful racket as the piano was battered by heads, jaws, elbows, and sometimes even knees.
And this wasn’t our only attack on the piano. It was still in danger even when me and my sister were getting along or when we were facing off with the piano one-on-one.
We’d sit on top of the keyboard lid. Sometimes we stood barefoot up there and jumped off. We even sat on the very top. Jumped off from that too. We touched the keys without washing our hands first, smearing margarine, jam, chocolate, ice cream, and mud across everything. We napped facedown on the ivories, drooling onto the keys. Licked them too. We beat them with things other than our fingers—recorders, pencils, rulers, our doll Rika’s hands, even though her fingers were fused together. Instead of pushing down on the keys with our fingers, we used our nails to raise them, trying to pry them loose. We didn’t ease the lid down, we slammed it. Sometimes we lowered it partway and let gravity do the rest. Either method always set the strings trembling, and we could hear their muffled cries inside the piano. We sat on the bench and put our feet to the lid, pushing until the bench teetered on only two legs. We balanced there, rocking, reading manga. We hadn’t learned how to use the pedals yet, but we stomped on them. Sometimes while I was playing, my sister would dive under the keys and push the pedals with her hands or her rear.
Mom would scold and yell and say things like, “Don’t you feel sorry for Mr. Piano?” but she was another bad guy. She never separated us from the piano. She was equally guilty.
I imagine this kind of piano abuse happened in a lot of households. And me and my sister think it’s not at all unnatural that the pianos vowed to retaliate with an uprising.

Once the pianos learned to bite, the ones who got the short end of the stick were people like, for example, my piano teacher. People who really love music.
Mom didn’t send us to some corporate music school like the one she went to. She relied on her friends’ connections to find a teacher who was giving private lessons out of her home. Mom found a lady who had won several national piano competitions in her teens and studied abroad in the Czech Republic. Our teacher still appeared in concerts from time to time and had a banker husband who loved classical music.
Once a week, Mom packed us into her car and took us to our lessons. Our teacher’s home was an apartment just as tiny as ours, and one room was almost entirely occupied by a single grand piano. I have no idea how they got that piano inside that room, but unlike our upright, that grand was cherished. Our teacher had a son, a boy right between me and my sister’s ages. That was T. Of course he had a real name, but in the end he was a T, so I think that’s good enough.
T was an amazing piano player—of course, so were all the other Ts in the world. After all, T had been listening to his mother play since the moment he was born, and she never stopped teaching him. If he wasn’t at school or eating, and she wasn’t with another student, she was making him practice, so obviously he was amazing. While I was sick of doing Czerny over and over, he’d already mastered all of Bach’s Inventions and was about halfway through the Sinfonias, and while the faces I pulled as I played my way through Bartok’s bizarre music had my sister in stitches, he was crushing Chopin and Mozart’s sonatas. T was entering junior competitions even before me and my sister started lessons with his mother, and he’d won some prizes too. There were even newspaper articles about him, each of them framed and sitting on a knickknack shelf over their toilet.
While me and my sister had our lessons, Mom sat silently in the corner on a chair, making sure we didn’t get up to any trouble. In the car on the ride home, she compared both of us to T nonstop.
“You should be as serious as T!” she warned. Sometimes her coaxing was sweeter: “If you would just practice enough, I'm sure you’d be able to play as well as him.”
Me and my sister both knew that no matter how serious we got, no matter how much we practiced, there was no way that was going to happen. It was baffling how our mother couldn’t see that.
Once in elementary school, I wrote an essay about how I wanted to become a manga artist when I grew up, and when I got home, my mother, fed up, said, “Don’t you mean a pianist?” Shortly after that, my little sister wrote in an essay that she wanted to run a clothing store, which made Mom exclaim, “I can’t believe you two!”
T wrote, “I want to be a piano when I grow up.” His mom told our mom about that, laughing as she said, “I don’t know what to do with him.” Mom in turn used this as an example—“That’s how much T loves the piano”—I don’t know what kind of message that was supposed to send us.
Even T’s weird little habit was a virtue as far as Mom was concerned. You see, little by little, T started dozing off as he played.
We saw this more than once when Mom brought us to our teacher’s apartment for lessons. T had to practice until his mother’s students arrived, and on days when we got there a little early, we could watch him.
At first we thought his eyes were closed because he was entranced by the beauty of the music he was playing. His performance continued without a hitch, so that’s what we assumed. Even his mother thought that. My sister decided that if she copied him, she might look like she was better at the piano too. But when she tried, her arms went all over the place and her already terrible performance got even worse.
Eventually T’s head began lolling back and forth, and it was clear to anyone watching that he was asleep. But even then, there were no mistakes in his performance. His fingers pressed the correct keys with unbelievable speed, and he decrescendoed and crescendoed with feeling, following the score exactly.
His mother worried about this a lot, and we heard that she scolded him all the time.
When we arrived at our teacher’s apartment, we would hear T playing. Even as our teacher beckoned us in, the sound of him in the piano room continued. When she let us into the room, we saw T’s closed eyes were red and swollen with tears, and his head jerked with his magnificent performance, like he was playing to the peanut gallery. Since we were there, our teacher was smiling, but it was clear that she was upset.
Our mom, however, was really and truly moved. “Now look there. T is practicing himself to sleep!” she said.
Eventually, T fell asleep during a recital. It was the only recital our teacher ever had us give in the three years we took lessons from her.
Me and my sister weren’t doing a four-handed piece, but Mom still made us wear matching white dresses. And of course, around our waists were a blue ribbon for me and a pink one for my sister. The dresses weren’t as poofy as I’d wanted, and the ribbons weren’t nearly as pastel as I’d imagined them—they were pretty eye-scorching shades of blue and pink.
T walked on stage, bowed, and sat at the bench, but the moment he placed his hands over the keys, his head snapped back so hard I almost jumped. There was such force I almost thought his head would fall off, roll across the stage, and plop right into my lap in the first row. Head flopping the whole time, T played Liszt’s Liebesträume to the very end. His performance was magnificent. I don’t think there was a single flub. The moment the song ended, T opened his eyes, stood and bowed, fighting a yawn.
Mom didn’t hesitate to give him wild applause. Up until she started, no one had clapped. Carried along by our mother, the concert hall drowned in the sound of applause. As I clapped, I glanced over my shoulder to peek at our teacher. Her face was bone white, and one of her eyes was twitching. “Hey, keep your eyes on the stage,” said my mother, yanking my sleeve. Then she leaned down close to my ear and whispered, “Come on, when you get as good as T, you’ll be able to play it like that in your sleep, too.” Even having watched that entire display, Mom was truly moved.
Of course she doesn’t say that kind of thing anymore.
Now, tears in her eyes, she says, “I'm so glad you two didn't turn out like T. Just stay my sweet little girls.”
Of course now my sister and I love the piano like we never did before. We treat it much better.
“Pianos don’t have a brain, right? That’s why they’re so stupid,” my sister says as she strokes the wood.
“That’s right,” I agree. After all, when the pianos revolted, they left us alone. In fact we were overjoyed. Because we didn’t have to practice piano anymore.
Me and my sister do have brains, so we come up with new and more effective ways for the pianos to exact their revenge against humanity.
“If I were a piano, I’d fall on top of you. Bam! And then I would crush you,” I suggest, turning toward my sister. She shrieks with laughter.
“You won’t do that, right?” She climbs on top of the bench, spreads her arms wide, and hugs the piano. Then she rubs her cheek against the top. “You’re a good piano. You won’t do awful things like my big sister.”
“Well, what would you do then, if you were a piano?” I ask as I open the lid a crack. My sister thinks.
“Hmm . . . Push and crush! I’d push you and crush you!”
“Oh come on, you’re just copying me.”
“Am not! You said you were going to fall on me. I could dodge that. See what I would do is, if I were a piano, I’d aim right for you and fly—pyoon!—and then on the other side of you, there’d be a wall, and I’d squish you between the wall and me. Squish you flat.”
“That’s basically the same,” I sigh. I feel bad that my little sister is so stupid. But I feel even worse for our piano.
“Hey, did you hear that?” I ask it. “You could have done something like that. We would have run away though, me and my sister. But you could have done that.”
I plop both my hands on the piano.
When I do, the piano bites my fingers. I say bites, but it doesn’t really hurt or anything. The right black or white keys grab the right fingers, sink until they meet the bottom of the keyboard, and then pass those fingers off to the next keys.
The song begins. I’m pretty sure it’s one of Bach’s Sinfonias. I don’t know which number or what key, though it’s definitely minor. I heard T play it once.
My sister leaps off the piano bench, so I can sit down. I look like I’m giving a brilliant piano performance all while standing, but I haven’t done anything. I’m just giving my body over. The piano itself is biting my fingers and through them temporarily taking control of the muscles of my arms all the way up to my shoulders, using my body to perform the music. Standing doesn’t mess up anything, but still I sit on the bench. My sister crawls under the keyboard beneath the highest notes, wrapping her arms around her knees and sitting quietly.
This is why we don’t have to practice anymore. It’s the same when my sister puts her hands on the keys. The same for Mom, for anybody.
All of a sudden the pianos were alive, so they didn’t need skilled players anymore. Now the pianos borrow people’s hands and play whatever they like however they like. If they don’t have a person’s hands, they’re as silent as they ever were.
When this first happened, a lot of people said pianos weren’t alive. Nobody could believe it. I saw some scientist on TV saying, “No. Pianos are not living beings. They have no metabolism.” “Metabolism” appeared in big letters at the bottom of the screen. But after a while, sure enough, they were saying, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. They are alive.” This is because pianos that had been neglected long enough or whose owners ignored them because they thought they were creepy started dying.
Pianos who were opened daily, given hands on their keys, and allowed to bite those hands and play, didn’t die. If you need a metabolism to be alive, I think a piano’s metabolism must be performing music.
It’s easy to tell when a piano is dead, just like with any other organism. When a piano breathes its last, its wood goes limp and it can’t keep its piano shape anymore, collapsing into a sloppy mess on the floor. If you just leave it there, it’ll start to stink and maggots will appear, and if you leave it even longer, it’ll turn into this watery goop, sinking into the flooring or carpet and rotting the foundations of the house. If it gets that far along, you’re really in trouble. You won’t be able to clean it up—all you can do is renovate.
Of course the thing that actually convinced people was the emergence of all the Ts. Because of them, nobody could say pianos weren’t alive anymore.
When I say Ts, I mean kids like our teacher’s. Kids who liked piano and were really good at it and could make pianos react like they were almost alive just by touching them with their miraculous fingertips, the few kids who, once the pianos were on the brink of coming alive and only needed the slightest encouragement to explode into the next step of their evolution, transformed into pianos themselves. 
We only found out later, but T’s ability to keep playing piano so well in his sleep was a sign. In order to give the piano the kick it needed, T had to use so much of his own strength, and of course that put him to sleep.
Naturally, nowadays the pianos give the best performances even if the players are asleep. The story is that T and kids like him metamorphosed, pulled along by the final wave of evolution that allowed the pianos to come alive, and since all the pianos in the world are now fully living beings, there won’t be another T. That’s what they said on this TV show, “In Search of the Mystery Behind the Transformers: Piano Phenomenon.” Come to think of it, on the day of our final piano lesson, wasn’t T crawling around on his hands and knees? That was the last time I saw him in his human form.
That day when the lesson was done and we left the room, T was down on all fours in the entryway, his backside to us. Our teacher growled out, “What exactly do you think you’re doing?” but T didn’t start, didn’t even move. “You’re blocking the entryway,” she said, her voice even more terrifying, but still he didn’t move. I had never seen T mess around like that before, so I got a little excited, and before I knew it, I had put my hands on his back and vaulted right over him. My sister shrieked with glee and copied me. T’s back was strangely solid. And it felt too flat somehow. Like a wooden board. But other than that, his back was warm. Like a normal person’s. I think that’s the only time I ever touched him when he was in human form. T remained on all fours, even as my sister and me put on our shoes, and when we waved goodbye to him, he just raised his head to say goodbye in return. The next week, our teacher called to say T wasn’t feeling well, so our lessons were canceled. The same call came the next week, and the next, on and on. Somewhere in there, pianos all over the world came to life and raised a big stink.
According to “In Search of the Mystery Behind the Transformers: Piano Phenomenon,” the transformation of T and others like him happened like this. At first they crawled all over the place, but later they stopped moving, no matter what. By then, the skin’s lignification had already begun. The skin got darker too. As their bodies began to expand, their human features started to disappear, until they assumed the form of an upright or a grand piano. The form is apparently based on the type of piano they played most often as a human. The entire transformation took about a month.
Mom started crying and couldn’t finish watching the episode. Me and my sister got bored after they finished showing the CG video of the transformation process, so we ran off to the tatami room to give some attention to our piano.
We heard Mom say to Dad, “I feel bad for T. Really. His mother, too. I suppose it’s just bad luck.”
I feel the same. I don’t know if I feel bad for T, but I do feel bad for his mom.
That’s why me and my sister haven’t stopped going to her place once a week.

Once we arrive at our teacher’s apartment, we hop, skip, and jump our way across the parking lot out front, heading for a feral, weather-beaten grand piano. My sister throws open the lid with a bang and begins playing Chopin’s Revolutionary. Of course it’s the piano doing the playing. The feral piano’s lid has been left open, so it sounds pretty bad. But when Revolutionary plays on a piano so out of tune, it actually sounds kind of amazing.
I wrap my arms around the prop holding the piano’s lid open and peek inside. The hammers connected to the keys that grab my sister’s fingers pound away at the strings, and the sound swells along the strange curve of the piano, stealing up over my face and filling the air. Maybe pianos were alive from the start—way, way back, even before they became like this. Happy, I place both my hands on the grand’s flanks and jump up, putting my weight on it like I’m mounting a gymnastics bar.
We see a lot of feral pianos around, illegally dumped by people who are afraid a piano will die in their house. The ferals abandoned along school routes tend to keep on living. Kids can’t leave feral cats alone, let alone feral pianos.
This particular grand piano is the one my sister and I played at our lessons. The transformed T has become the magnificent grand piano in his mother’s home, but that means there isn’t room for this one, so it was tossed out. Luckily, there are a lot of kids in this apartment complex, and more elementary and middle schoolers in the neighborhood, so it hasn’t been too hard for this piano to keep on living.
When Revolutionary finishes, Mom calls for us. We take the elevator to our teacher’s floor and press the intercom button. She emerges to let us in. She’s looking older lately. Even though she and Mom are about the same age.
Me and my sister run straight to the room where we used to have our lessons, the room that’s now T’s.
I think our mom and our teacher are friends now. They have tea in the living room and talk about stuff.
I think me and my sister are friends with T, too. Even though back when he was just our teacher’s son, we barely said hello when we found him dashing off a disgustingly perfect performance.
Carefully I place my hands on T’s lid and heave it open. This is his back. My sister lifts the prop, and I set the lid in place. T’s huge beautiful innards glisten below me. He’s completely different from the feral piano downstairs. Not a speck of rust on his strings, tuning pins glittering.
My sister lifts the keyboard lid and removes the felt cover, red as a tongue, and the blinding white keys appear. I remember T had such strong perfect teeth back when he was a human.
She pulls out the bench. I sit and set my hands on the keys. Soft and round like I’m holding eggs in my palms, just like our teacher taught us.
T, who was once our teacher’s son, bites my fingers. I don’t really understand how, but it feels like instead of the skin of my fingertips, T is tugging at the thin, thin strings of nerves and muscles beneath.
“Hey, play a song I know, T,” I tell him, cutting in before he can start his performance. I feel him waver for just a moment. Yes, he definitely hesitated. I think he was rethinking his song choice. For me.
He begins his performance.
“Oh, I know this one, I know it!” I shout.
“I know it!” my sister shouts. Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker. My sister begins to spin and spin. She’s trying to dance along.
I butt in. “That’s not how the dance goes.”
“Then how does it go?”
I have no idea. But it’s not that.
When she realizes I don’t know the answer, she grins and tries to raise one leg, but it hits the wall first. She doesn’t seem to mind though, raising both hands and joining her palms above her head, wriggling her whole body. “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” ends. When I don’t take my hands off the keyboard, “Waltz of the Flowers” begins.
I let T do as he will, taking in the strike of the hammers and the quivering of the strings with only the barest touch of my fingers.
Of course I can hear the song with my ears. And I understand that what I’m hearing is beautiful. But I don’t taste the kind of pleasure I felt back when it was me and my sister in our tatami room, me calmly playing as I ignored her screams and rants. Back then, me and the sound were under only my body’s orders. My body was the music itself. It’s different now. That kind of feeling will never happen again. Me and the sound, we’re under the piano’s orders. My body is just a part of the instrument. The one tasting that pleasure is T. He’s playing and ignoring the world, just the way I ignored my sister.
Of course, none of this bothers me at all.
One way or another, humanity has lost the right to play the piano under their own power, but that’s nothing to people like me and my sister. I really do feel bad for our teacher, though. She has all this talent she worked so hard to polish, but she can’t use it to give any performances, plus her son’s like this.
Right now, me and my sister are obsessed with T and the other pianos, but sooner or later, we’ll get tired of them. We’ll stop coming by. Friendships change with the passing of time, that’s just the way it is. Our mom will probably do something about our upright eventually. Ask the ward office how to get rid of it or call someone to euthanize it. People doing that kind of work have popped up recently. We’ve seen flyers in our mailbox.
I’m fine with that. My sister will be too, of course. Mom might cry a little, but she’ll probably be fine.