Picking Bones from Ash Read Free Page A

who crowded together in an auditorium to slog through Mozart and Beethoven. By now I had half a dozen photo albums, which my mother stocked with pictures, my essays, and pressed wildflowers.
    The weekend after I harvested bamboo shoots, I wore a pair of wool mittens my mother had knitted for me to keep my fingers warm. When it was my turn to play, I strode up to the piano, made eye contact with the judges, and bowed, counting to five as my mother had taught me. Two counts to go down, one to linger, and then two to come back up. My fingers slid easily through the first movement of the Mozart Sonata in A Minor, Köchel 310, despite the difficult left-hand passages. My picture appeared in the local paper the next day, with Tomoko’s face just barely cropped outof one side, and my mother’s face on the other. I still have the clipping. At the time, I felt very regal and important, every inch the heir to the throne of the moon people.
    Tomoko had made it her mission to come to almost all my competitions. After I performed, she always came to the edge of the stage and solemnly handed me a bouquet of
nogiku
wild chrysanthemums in autumn and freesias in the spring. We bowed to each other in imitation of seventeenth century French courtiers we’d read about in history class. Thus I was able to prolong my time on stage by a good thirty seconds or so.
    Flowers were something of a luxury in those days. Our town, Kuma-ume, was located along the Mogami River, just one of a series of small towns lost in northern Japan, barely subsisting after the war. But Tomoko’s family owned a small chain of laundries in several neighboring towns, all the way to Yamadera, and was relatively well off. The family indulged their only daughter’s childhood whim to be my champion, though they themselves were less inclined to cheer for me or to pose in my photos.
    I had grown accustomed to winning, and my teacher, an elderly man named Mr. Kisahara who had sported a mustache since the Taisho era and studied music in Tokyo, was used to being the teacher of a prizewinning student. We knew most of the other music students in the area, and had cataloged their foibles. I also understood, from having spent time watching my mother in the bar, the valuable power of gossip. If I caught wind that Mariko, the goody-goody, was going to try to play Debussy in the next contest, Mr. Kisahara and I determined that I would play Ravel. If I learned that Satoshi, the technician, was going to play a Bach fugue, I played the same piece and vowed to be better.
    So it was perhaps a bit surprising that my mother conspired to enter me in a new contest that would take place the following fall in the city of Akita, a good five hours away. This was the Tōhoku regional competition and included students from all the northern prefectures, including my own.
    “Satomi has a false sense of her abilities,” my mother said sternly to my teacher. “She needs a good competition to wake her up.”
    “We don’t know the competitors,” Mr. Kisahara retorted. “What should she play?”
    “True competition,” she replied coolly, “implies risk. Satomi needs to learn this.”
    We settled on two pieces. I chose Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” (because it was about the moon). To complement this, my mother insisted I tackle the Beethoven
Moonlight
Sonata.
    All summer I practiced my two pieces in secret. One day in October, when the maples had started to blush on the mountainsides, my mother and I watered the plants, giving extra care to the
hechima
vine just outside the entrance to the
izakaya
. In her clear and careful handwriting, my mother wrote a note, which she placed in the pub window, explaining that we would be out of town and that the business would be closed for three days. Of course everyone in town already knew why we were leaving, but she wrote that our absence was due to a “family situation.” To anyone else she would have looked poised as she locked the door, but I knew she