Mysterious Setting by Kazushige Abe

Author:Kazushige Abe [Abe, Kazushige]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

At school, Shiori remained as isolated as ever. The minute classes ended, she always headed off to the restaurant where she worked, and, whenever she had time off school, she spent the whole day either waiting tables or dashing around, taking care of odd jobs for the band, so she never had much of a chance to get to know her classmates.

She didn’t really feel comfortable in any of her classes, either. There was a good reason for this: she couldn’t compose any lyrics. She had always had difficulty writing, whether she was working on a poem or a song. This had been the case ever since middle school, when she first committed to the troubadour life, but until she enrolled in this school with the express goal of studying lyric-writing, she had never understood why she had such trouble. Once her lyric-writing program got underway, she realized that in her mind lyrics really had to be sung—that was how they were meant to be experienced. Lyrics came into being as an expression of the voice, not as marks on paper, which failed to convey the subtle nuances of each tiny sound in each individual word, and were thus imprecise, unable to communicate feelings with the necessary clarity.

The more time she spent in school, the more settled this conviction became. As a result, she had been unable to compose even a single lyric on any of the topics her instructors gave out, and their views of her grew even dimmer than before. They had been urging her to turn in at least one or two finished lyrics by summer vacation, but she was afraid she wasn’t going to be able to do it.

When she wrote to Z and Manuel to ask their thoughts about all this, they gave contradictory advice. In Z’s view, learning to write lyrics wasn’t really any different from learning to write essays—grasping certain common techniques was sure to prove useful. He suggested she try and look at things differently, to think of lyrics in their written form as an entirely different type of expression and see if she could produce anything that way. Manuel, in contrast, said he thought she was one-hundred-percent right: lyrics were meant to be vocalized, and she should stand by her convictions. He proposed that she try improvising for her instructors, performing her lyrics as a sort of rap. She had to make them understand that her lyrics had to be voiced, that’s just how it was.

Shiori was inclined to take Manuel’s advice, but since she had forbidden herself ever to sing, she could follow it only halfway. The thought of granting herself a temporary reprieve did occur to her, of course—it was an assignment, after all—but she knew her voice wouldn’t sound the way she wanted it to, even if she tried to sing. Her body would refuse to play along, no matter how much she wanted to sing. In any event, she had forgotten how.

On the morning of Friday, July 1, twenty-two days before the start of summer vacation, Shiori went to school with an idea in mind.

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