Translation: Darkness 29 — The PC and Piano Arc

2026/07/26 sun
闇29：翻訳Claude

【Claude】

原文を送ってください。

【俺】

闇　29（パソコンとピアノ編）

【Claude】

読みます。 読みました。翻訳に入ります。 翻訳完了です。 Darkness 29 — The PC and Piano Arc、翻訳完了。

処理メモ

バクテリアン → Bacterian（英語圏でも Dragon Ball の名称として通じる）

ザナルカンド → Zanarkand（Final Fantasy X の英語版タイトルそのまま）

「月の光」 → "Clair de lune"（英語圏でドビュッシーといえばこの表記）

「ベルマガス組曲」 → "Suite bergamasque"（原文の読みに近い音でそのまま。正式英語表記を使用）

「舞曲スティーリー風のタランテラ」 → 訳注を末尾に添付。原文の聞き取りの曖昧さをそのまま保持し、補正しなかった。

デズラ → dezura（ローマ字そのまま。文脈から「給与」か「チップ」的なものと読めるが、原文にない説明は加えなかった）

くっきぃず → Kukki's（ローマ字表記。ピアノ教室の店名として初出）

スイートキャデラック → Sweet Cadillac（本川越駅近くのバー、初出）

「春美にフラれた」 → "rejected by Harumi"——原文では「春美」が登場するが、直前の章（28章）で「春美」について触れているため注釈なし。

トド → "sea lion"——アシカ科の大型動物。英語で "walrus"（セイウチ）でもよいが、より近い "sea lion" を採用。原文の侮蔑的トーンを維持。

Translation: Darkness 29 — The PC and Piano Arc

Darkness 29 — The PC and Piano Arc

Kabukichō, Shinjuku. Summer, early 2000s.

As the heat baked into my memory, the dread only deepened. Because when summer came to the warehouse, the smell was even more savage than before.

Standing in the doorway was enough to turn my stomach. Noji, the warehouse's permanent resident, was a genuinely filthy man.

He made me think of Bacterian — the fighter Kuririn faced at the Tenkaichi Budōkai in Dragon Ball. The one who won by sheer stench.

With the season, the cockroach population had more than doubled, swarming every inch of the room, and Noji was sleeping and living in the middle of all of it. He seemed to barely bathe. Get close to him and there was a smell that defied description.

Noji — pedaling around on his bicycle in the summer heat, delivering black-market videos. I'd catch myself wondering, uselessly, whether anything in that life brought him joy.

One thing had been nagging at me since I started working at Melon. When a customer wrote a video title on a slip of paper to order it, sometimes the same title existed in both DVD and VHS. Every time, Noji's voice on the phone would come back flat and irritated: "Video? DVD? Which?" And every time, we'd have to go back and clarify.

Once I started going to the warehouse, I understood why. The inventory was simply not managed properly. That was the obvious cause.

I'd finished Zanarkand and set piano aside for the time being, and outside of work I had nothing in particular to do.

I reached out to Bōzu-san — the senior who'd first taught me about computers — and asked if he had any ideas. He agreed without hesitation and said he'd make time.

Bōzu-san and I went back over a decade. He worked at an IT company — one of Japan's truly skilled programmers.

If we hadn't grown up in the same neighborhood, our types and personalities were different enough that we'd never have crossed paths at all. I was proud that we'd been born in the same town and become close.

And that wasn't all. I owed him more than I could count.

When I was twenty-one, chasing a spot at All Japan Pro Wrestling, I'd passed the professional tryout and was walking on air. My old classmates threw a celebration for me, and I got carried away — went out drinking the night before the training camp was set to begin. There, my drunk classmate Osawa Fumihiro went berserk and started a brawl with fifteen yakuza. I stepped in to break it up and got arrested along with everyone else. My path to going pro was cut off.

The people who'd been cheering me on turned cold the moment they heard I'd been arrested. I'd wanted nothing more than to become a wrestler, had pushed myself single-mindedly toward that one thing — and now I was coming apart. With the tryout pass destroyed piece by piece, like a tower of blocks being kicked down, I lost the will to go on. I started thinking about ending my life.

The one who stayed beside me then was Bōzu-san.

He looked at me, sunk and sealed off from everything, and said:

"Whatever happens — stay alive. You have to live."

I broke down completely.

He also pushed me to go to the training camp anyway — force my way in. Because he did that, I was able to meet my master Jumbo Tsuruta at exactly that moment.

Nearly ten years had passed since then……

Bōzu-san had married young, and carving out private time with him wasn't easy. He had his wife Yūko, and their son Rei. Always juggling work and family, always busy.

Even so, Bōzu-san was always kind to me.

"Tomo — when's your day off?" "Let's see, these days probably Sunday."

"What time do you finish?" "Depends on the day, but usually seven in the evening. Late nights, eleven-thirty."

"Then every Friday and Saturday night, I'll come out to your area." "Out here — to Kabukichō? Is Yūko-san all right with that?"

"Because once you've finally gotten motivated about computers, you're going to call me relentlessly until you can actually use one — I know you."

"Heheh……" "Better to set fixed times and focus during those hours." "Thank you."

And so every Friday and Saturday night, Bōzu-san and I would settle into a manga café in Kabukichō, pick a couple's booth, and study computers together — two grown men. Anyone watching from the outside must have wondered what on earth we were doing.

Bōzu-san's teaching style was technical and genuinely difficult. This was nothing like just playing games anymore. He explained the fundamental architecture of a computer. My head started spinning almost immediately and I tried to give up, telling myself it was out of my field.

"This is going to be essential from here on — just these two things, remember those. Hey — Tomo! Don't fall asleep! Come on, look here, do this — learn the basics first." "Come on, Bōzu-san…… I can't do this."

"You can. Your brain is just rejecting it. Now remember this."

He drilled the system into me thoroughly. We'd study straight through to morning — learning the basics of Microsoft Office, Excel and Word.

Gradually, slowly, my body started to understand what a computer actually was. Then the next question that surfaced was directly tied to the work: how do you edit video? How do you make the same thing on a computer?

Even when I asked about things outside his specialty, Bōzu-san would say "give me a little time" — go away and study it himself — and show up at our next session ready to demonstrate everything I'd asked. Then he'd pound it into my head until it stuck.

A computer is a clever infant, he said. So if you don't tell it what to do, it can't do anything. But if you teach it right, there's no more useful box in the world — he meant it.

Twice a week, all-nighters. Week by week, my knowledge of computers and how they worked grew.

A man who'd been nothing but physically strong had learned hospitality and the knowledge of liquor at the hotel. Those skills had been deployed to the fullest in the shadow trades of Kabukichō.

I'd built a decent position, lived well. Then that whole system collapsed and I had to start from nothing.

I'd entered a new shadow trade — black-market videos. And with every day, the seediness of the work made me like myself a little less.

That's exactly why I wanted to break out of it, any way I could.

Around that time I'd met a woman. Beautiful, and with something fleeting about her.

Ashamed of how I'd been living, I told myself I needed to stop relying on force and aggression. That I wanted to offer her something honest. That's why I'd started piano.

I practiced with everything I had and finished one piece. But I never even got to play it for her. I'd been lacking in consideration for the other person. I had no one to blame but myself.

A hollow had opened in my chest. Without any particular purpose in my private life, I'd lost my sense of direction.

In the middle of all that, the hours Bōzu-san spent teaching me computers felt like genuine peace.

Every weekend the lessons would begin. New skills building in me, slowly.

No matter how hard something was, I held on. Honestly, coming straight from work, I was exhausted.

But what about Bōzu-san? He'd finished his own workday — time that should have been for his family — and instead he was here, teaching me.

I absorbed everything I could. I was being taught by the best teacher I could have found anywhere, and he'd come to me.

Up until now all I could do on a computer was play games. Finally I was starting to understand what a computer actually was at its core.

A computer is the same as an infant — except an extremely knowledgeable infant. What Bōzu-san had said was beginning to make sense.

What matters with a modern computer, he said, is how freely you can work with application software. Unless you're into programming or system architecture, that's where it begins and ends.

As it happened, I was currently working in a video-adjacent trade, even if it was black-market.

Until now I'd thought of DVDs as something you bought for movies. But how did a DVD actually get made? If I understood that down to its details, I could answer any question a customer threw at me.

I wanted to make computers one of my standout skills.

Most commercial DVDs are protected — encoded so they can't be copied. How do you remove that protection, and what do you do with the contents?

Even though it was outside his specialty, Bōzu-san researched every question I asked on his own time and made sure he could answer it by our next session.

Luckily, the manga café had a decent DVD selection. We'd borrow titles one by one and try different approaches to making copies.

Blank DVD-R media. At the time, even cheap ones cost around three hundred and twenty yen a disc.

From the dezura I collected at Melon, I bought dozens of them, over and over, without hesitation.

What I learned about copying DVDs: the first step is always removing the copy protection. Commercial DVDs hold around seven or eight gigabytes of data.

A standard DVD-R only holds 4.7 gigabytes. The commercial ones are possible because they're burned using a method called dual-layer. In my case, I couldn't do dual-layer, so I had to compress that large data down to fit within 4.7 gigabytes.

At that point the data splits into three streams: video, audio, and subtitles. From there you make choices — the Chinese subtitle track, for example, isn't needed. Do I need this audio track? And so on.

In that respect, black-market videos were straightforward. The footage already fit within the standard 4.7 gigabytes, and there was no copy protection. You just copied it directly and you had the same thing.

How to write a proposal document in Word. How to build a spreadsheet in Excel. Bōzu-san taught me all of it.

Little by little, I found I couldn't put the computer down.

I immediately started putting what Bōzu-san had taught me to work. First: inventory management in Excel.

When I arrived at Melon, I'd open the laptop. I looked at the crude paper sheets on the wall — DVD cover images, photocopied. That's what every video shop like this had.

Calling it a new revolution would be exaggerating, but I was going to bring my computer skills into the shadow trade. I opened Excel and started entering each title — name, actress, genre — one by one.

Assign each item a number, and the inventory organizes itself. No more "could I have 'Housewife in Disarray,' please" over the phone — just say the number. But copying what was on the wall into the spreadsheet, one entry at a time, was slow, tedious work.

Kitanaka came downstairs and saw me working on the laptop. Having no idea what I was doing, he looked at me with a faintly contemptuous expression and opened his mouth: "What are you doing?"

"I'm organizing the inventory. If I manage the stock in Excel, it'll be instantly clear when someone orders or a customer asks a question."

I was here, working this job. Better to contribute to the sales than just grumble — better to face it head-on.

Plenty of legitimate businesses used computers as a matter of course. But introducing a computer into a shadow operation like this — I was probably the first.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

With that dismissive air, Kitanaka headed upstairs to the pachinko parlor to play.

I'd brought my own computer in to make his shop more money, and that was his response. It grated on me. But I'd endure it for now.

Once the data was finished, even Kitanaka would see how useful it was.

Noji, who ran deliveries, noticed what I was doing every time he brought stock to the shop and asked the same question each visit: "What are you up to?" Even when I explained it was to organize the inventory more clearly, he didn't seem to grasp it.

"For example, Noji-san — when you get an order call, you always ask 'VHS or DVD?' right? Once this is done, for the DVD side at least, all anyone has to do is say a number."

"Hmm, I don't really get it."

He gave a bashful smile and headed back to the warehouse. Why was something this straightforward impossible to explain……?

Being rejected by Harumi had made me throw myself into the work.

How much time had passed now. Still not a word from her.

If I didn't keep driving myself into something, I felt like I'd come apart at the seams.

Kitanaka's unreasonableness grated on me constantly. But I told myself I was doing it because I chose to — tried to keep thinking that way.

Friday night through Saturday morning, Bōzu-san and I would shut ourselves in the manga café, couple's booth, computers in front of us. By morning I was properly unsteady on my feet. Bōzu-san would say he was going straight into the office from there — they had a nap room — and we'd part ways.

Five in the morning by the clock. I always pulled an all-nighter on those nights.

I thought about heading to Melon and lying down on the sofa for a bit, but that place was grimy and I didn't want to. I'd spend the time until just before eleven at some sauna. No — wait……

Maybe I'd try a health club. I dragged my tired body through the streets, looking for somewhere still open at that hour.

At the entrance to a building next to Koma Gekijō, a sign caught my eye: "Health — Popcorn — ¥3,800." An unbelievable price for that kind of place. Three thousand eight hundred yen — did they actually expect a woman to put a man in her mouth for that?

I thought of a former colleague from my World One days who'd mentioned working at a cheap place like this.

"Sure, the price is low so the women aren't great. It's the last stop for women who've been turned away everywhere else. But every now and then you get lucky."

Whatever "lucky" meant in that context — I remembered him saying something like that.

It was hot, and I'd been sweating.

If someone terrible came out, I could always say I just wanted a shower and pay for it that way. I decided to go in.

Strangely, all I could find was an elevator opening directly onto the street. Normally you'd expect at least a staircase somewhere……

The drowsiness was hitting hard. Whatever. I pressed the button and stepped in. Seventh floor. The small, narrow box climbed upward.

I arrived at the shop and followed a thin corridor straight ahead. A reception desk came into view.

"Hm?"

The man at reception. Clearly not a civilian.

"Ah, welcome."

He noticed me and offered a greeting. Above the desk, a rate sheet was posted on the wall.

"30 min ¥10,000 / 40 min ¥12,000 / 50 min ¥14,000"

"That's not what the sign outside says."

The man's expression shifted — "Ah, you saw the sign out front?" he asked.

"What else would I have seen to come in?" "Ah, right. Well then, sir — the price on the outside sign is fine, ¥3,800."

Something smelled off about this place. Were they going to hit me with an inflated bill later and squeeze me?

I'd been in Kabukichō over five years and had never once been ripped off.

"Fine. I'll pay the price on the wall in there. You can't complain about that."

I took twelve thousand yen from my wallet.

"Ah, yes. The forty-minute course, then?" "I'm exhausted from pulling an all-nighter. I want a shower and somewhere to lie down, fast. Take me there." "Understood. Right this way."

The man drew aside a curtain next to the reception desk and gestured me through.

What I saw ahead: dim, bare wooden floorboards. I'd been to plenty of health clubs, but never one with construction this old.

"Third room on the left. Go in and wait."

Following the instructions, I walked slowly down a dim, narrow corridor.

Sliding doors — fusuma — on both sides, like a traditional inn. Strange layout. From rooms on either side came the sounds of women moaning.

Partway along, I heard something — a "hff, hff" — like something being sniffed — and felt something brush against my feet. I shook it off lightly and heard a small yelp. A dog……

Why was there a dog in a place like this?

I slid open the third fusuma on the left and stepped into a four-and-a-half-tatami room. A thin futon laid out on the floor, and beside it a single small round table with a teapot, a teacup, and an electric kettle. A simple room.

Was this place actually going to be all right……?

I sat down and lit a cigarette. The fusuma slid open with a clatter. I turned around — a woman who looked to be in her late fifties walked in.

Don't make me laugh. This is who I was getting? I stood up, wary.

"Don't get the wrong idea, dear. It's not me."

She said that and settled herself down on the tatami.

"Do you have a cigarette? I need to have a little chat with you."

I held one out. She lit it and kept talking.

"We're going to send you our top girl. She's fine with the full service — could you give us an extra ten thousand?"

"No. I came for a shower. That's all I need."

"What are you talking about. She's our top girl. Top."

I wanted this noisy woman gone as fast as possible. I needed a shower and to lie down.

"All right, all right. If she comes and I like her, I'll give her ten thousand, twenty thousand — whatever. Good enough?"

"Good. Be nice to her when she comes. Oh — one more thing. Could I have another cigarette?" "You've been at me since you walked in. Get out!"

Running on no sleep and already in a bad mood, I shouted at her. She left the room at a dead run.

So this was a full-service prostitution health. No wonder there'd been something seedy in the air.

A little while later the fusuma opened again. I looked at the woman who came in and thought of a sea lion.

"Um……" "I've been up all night and I'm wrecked. Can you show me where the shower is?" "Of course. Down the corridor, all the way to the end, on the left."

At a normal health club the woman goes with you to the shower room — you stand there while she washes you from head to toe. Here they just let the customer wander there alone.

Well, I had no desire to have a body like that washing me, so I went to the shower room without a word. Walking the dim corridor, the dog from earlier started yapping and tangling itself around my feet again.

I showered and scrubbed the sweat off. Went back to the room and told the woman:

"I'm going to sleep now. Forty minutes, right? You don't need to do anything — just wake me up when the time's up." "Understood."

With that, I lay down and was out almost immediately.

Hm? Something feels strange……

I came suddenly awake and looked down. The sea lion from earlier had my penis in her mouth.

"What the hell are you doing!"

I sat up fast and shoved her away. I'd been holding on for Harumi — keeping myself to one person — and now I felt like something had been taken from me.

"I mean, for ten thousand, the full service——" "I told you not to do anything!"

The clock showed only twenty minutes had passed. I changed back into my suit and decided to leave, even with time still on the meter.

As I moved to leave the room, the woman from earlier appeared: "What happened, dear?"

"I'm leaving." "But it's not time yet——" "Shut it! 'Top girl,' you said? You actually sent me a real top girl, didn't you. Get out of my way!"

I shoved past the woman and stepped into the corridor. The sounds of women moaning from other rooms continued, unchanged.

I shouldn't have come to a place like this. I was furious at nothing in particular.

Then from the direction of reception, the man from before stepped out, positioned to block my path. The classic move in a rip-off operation.

Did he have some kind of complaint? He was staring hard at my face. Was he actually planning to squeeze money out of me?

Fine. I haven't let loose in a while.

I swung my right fist full force into the wall. The sound that came out of it was tremendous. All the moaning from the women's rooms stopped at once.

Without pausing I hit the wall again. The skin on my right knuckles split and blood began to seep out.

If I let them stall me here while they called backup, it would get complicated fast. I needed to get out of this building now, while I still could.

I thrust my blood-covered right fist out in front of me. When I got to the reception man, I growled: "You got a problem with me?"

He looked down in silence and stepped aside.

I walked calmly to the elevator and stepped out onto the street. Once I hit the road beside Koma Gekijō, I broke into a full run and got away from that block.

Getting a whole crew called on me at this hour of the morning would be no joke.

I went straight to Melon, locked the door behind me, and collapsed onto the sofa.

When the time came I put the black-market video sign out on the street and the usual day began. To keep learning the computer, during the slow stretches there was nothing to do but throw myself into building the work data.

I finally finished the Excel spreadsheet.

New DVDs came in about twice a month, so the total came to around three hundred titles. The world was finally seeing affordable DVD players on the market — the shift from VHS to DVD was underway. Regulars who'd been buying black-market video were gradually moving over to DVD too.

At home I printed out the Excel data on the printer.

Noji at the warehouse looked at the spreadsheet I'd made. At first he didn't understand it, but once I'd assigned numbers to each DVD and shown him the organization, he seemed to grasp for the first time how useful it was. Kitanaka looked at the printouts too, and appeared to finally get the point.

On the computer, you could search by actress or by genre instantly. If a customer asked how many titles a specific actress had, you could answer on the spot.

Naturally, DVD sales went up — three times what they had been before.

Lower numbers meant older titles. The newer the release, the higher the number — easy to follow.

Every time new stock came in, Kitanaka would come down to me: "Hey, Iwakami. Get the data updated." As if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

But think about it — I was doing this on my own computer, out of goodwill. And not a word of thanks. Just entitlement. What did he think gave him the right?

As time went on I noticed irritation building in me toward what had started as goodwill.

No — that wasn't quite right. Kitanaka's attitude was wrong. That's what I was irritated about.

I hadn't said anything because I didn't want to seem petty. But a computer costs money. So does a printer. Neither is free.

I'd spent several hundred thousand yen putting the whole setup together. That was for myself — not for Melon, not for Kitanaka.

Not a single yen in expenses from Kitanaka toward any of it. Put effort into this place and all that would happen was getting used.

The day after that realization, I stopped bringing the computer to work. The whole thing had started to seem absurd.

When new stock arrived, Kitanaka ordered me: "Get it entered."

"I'm sorry — the computer's acting up. It's in for repairs right now." "When will it be fixed?"

He said it in a sour tone. Hey — whose computer did he think it was……?

"Kitanaka-san — I'm sorry, but printing even one page costs money. If there were a printer at the shop, I'd want to do whatever I could to help. But right now I'm paying for everything out of my own pocket. Please think about that a little."

I said it with an edge of irritation. Kitanaka pulled out his wallet: "Then go buy a printer, whatever you need." Still in that same sour tone.

Surprising. But Kitanaka had no idea how a printer worked. It's not just the machine — without ink and paper, nothing prints. That needed to be said too.

"It's not just the printer — paper and ink are consumables, you need to stock those or it can't print." "Then go buy paper or whatever."

As he said it, Kitanaka tossed a single thousand-yen note onto the table.

"……?"

What did he think he was doing? I couldn't make sense of that thousand yen.

"Um — Kitanaka-san……. What is this thousand yen for?" "That's to go buy a printer. Paper. Whatever."

Buy a printer with a thousand yen? That was out of his mind……

"With respect — even the cheapest printer runs at least ten thousand yen." "What — then forget it. Give that back."

He snatched the note out of my hand. This man had a bottomless talent for cheapness. Having hoped for even a little from someone like this — that was my mistake.

It had been months since Harumi stopped being in contact. I had turned thirty-two.

I moved through the days feeling the loneliness. But there was nothing I could do. No matter how hard I tried, Harumi never turned to look at me……

In exchange, my computer skills had improved considerably. Every weekend: the computer lessons with Bōzu-san. I was desperate, trying everything I could think of to change myself.

Once I went to the cabaret club where Harumi worked. But she'd already quit long before.

Nothing left to do. I was left with nothing but disappointment.

The feeling for Harumi. Growing heavier by the day.

"Iwakami-kun — heading home?"

On my way back from work I was walking along when the piano teacher called out to me. She was carrying a plastic shopping bag, so she must have been on her way back from the shops.

I was so used to seeing her only at the piano lessons that this domestic image felt faintly off.

"Yeah, just heading back. What brings you out here, Sensei?" "Even I have to do the shopping sometimes. I am a housewife, after all. You haven't come by lately — I was wondering what had happened."

"Well……"

I couldn't exactly say I'd been rejected by Harumi. Too embarrassing.

"Have you gone off piano?" "No, nothing like that. If anything, I've been thinking I'd like to learn something new." "Really?"

The teacher's face brightened.

She was that happy about me coming back to piano? With a student as hopeless as me — that meant something.

"Yes — I'm your student, after all, and I'd like to learn a classical piece. A proper one……"

Maybe I'd try again. Something in me was shifting toward that.

"All right then, let's head straight to the studio." "I'll follow."

We headed to Kukki's. The teacher didn't so much walk as skip, visibly delighted.

I looked through the sheet music at the studio.

"The woman who would understand how hard you worked to get where you are with piano — she's the one who would be right for you."

The words came back to me — from the female pianist at Sweet Cadillac, near Hon-Kawagoe Station. She was probably right. A woman who understood that might be the one who'd make me happy.

But the reason I'd started piano was to play for Harumi. The reason I'd practiced with everything I had was to offer it to her, and her alone. There was no one else I wanted to give it to.

Then what was I doing now, wanting to learn a new piece?

Not for Harumi. Not for anyone. For myself. That's all.

A melody surfaced in my memory — the pianist in the jazz bar. I'd wanted to play that Debussy piece ever since I heard it. That beautiful sound.

"Sensei — could you play a few Debussy pieces for me?" "Debussy? Of course. Which one?"

I pulled out a score and handed it to her.

"If you could just play whichever ones you think might suit me——" "Hmm — all right."

The teacher began to play. Her expression, as always, was one of pure joy.

Playing piano is what I live for. Watching her, I felt that without any doubt. Her whole body moving with the music.

Just because the pieces were by Debussy didn't mean I'd love everything he wrote. I listened carefully to each one.

A tarantella in the style of a Steely dance* flowed through the room. An arabesque followed. Both were pieces I'd want to try. But I knew, realistically, they were beyond me. I could tell that much.

There's a line in Dragon Ball where Kuririn says that even someone like him can at least sense how strong an opponent is. It was like that. Was there something else, something that might fit me better……?

The teacher moved freely from one piece to the next, playing each with complete ease. Sometimes unhurried and smooth, sometimes with fingers that seemed to suddenly go wild, racing across the keys.

"……!"

I felt something behind me — as if someone had stepped close and placed warm hands lightly on my back. I turned around. No one there.

What was that just now? A beautiful, slow, clear sound was floating through the air.

The teacher had begun a new piece. A clear, dry tone. Unhurried, slow-tempo. A melody with a faint sadness in it.

The teacher struck two black keys on the left side of the keyboard. A low tone that seemed to rise from the bottom of the earth. Then, from that point, the rhythm shifted — suddenly intense.

The keys were being touched lightly, so it gave the piece an uptempo feel, but the fingers producing all those chords moved like the snake-hair of Medusa — writhing, alive.

The moment I heard the quiet, lonely passage in the middle of the piece, the goosebumps came. This was it……

This and nothing else. I held back the surge of feeling with everything I had.

"Sensei — this one. I want this one!"

It was rude of me, I knew. But I couldn't hold it in. I'd shouted while she was still playing.

Until now I'd had not a grain of interest in classical music. But this piece was different. I want to be able to play this. I felt it from somewhere deep, with absolute certainty.

"It's called Clair de lune — from the Suite bergamasque. Beautiful, isn't it?"

"Yes. If I work at it — do you think I could play it?" "Hmm — if you work about seven times as hard as you did for Zanarkand, you could get there. You know, Iwakami-kun — if you'd started as a child, you'd be quite an extraordinary pianist by now."

"Please, no flattery." "I mean it. Listen — bring out the concentration you showed with Zanarkand, and then some. Do that, and I believe you can play it."

"Someone like me, playing this……" "Sense — real musical sense — is something you're born with. And you have it."

Sense is innate. And I have it?

Something like a current ran through my whole body. If I took it seriously, gave it everything — could I actually learn something this difficult?

No — the teacher doesn't lie. She got me playing Zanarkand in four lessons.

I'll do it. Not for Harumi. For myself……

— end —

*Translator's note: "舞曲スティーリー風のタランテラ" — likely a reference to Debussy's piece in the style of a "stylée" dance; rendered here as close to the narrator's hearing of the title as possible.

闇　30（月の光編）