Beyond the Notes by Susan Tomes

Author:Susan Tomes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2014-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Day Five – Osaka

Sign in shop: ‘Coffee Maker – Tasty Time since 1924’.

A high-quality tailor’s shop in Osaka, obviously trying to evoke the ones in London, was called ‘Sevile Road’.

The others have gone off to Hakone, and I am to practise in a rented studio in downtown Osaka. Mr N. has described its location and also drawn me a map, but when I emerge from the tube station I find I’ve left the map in my hotel room. So I try to find the place from its description. The streets are full of office buildings, each with many floors of completely unrelated companies. All the signs are in Japanese, and I can see no reference to my ‘Lesson Hall’. So I start asking people in coffee shops and foyers, but nobody speaks English, or not enough to understand my question. One lady even leaves her desk to take me across to the Fire Station, where she says the firemen keep a detailed map of the area. But the map only shows the numbers of buildings (wildly complicated in Japan) and the firemen have never heard of a piano studio nearby. Finally, after wandering about in the rain for quite a while, I decide that there’s nothing for it but to go back to the hotel and get the map. Of course, by the time I’ve done this, I’ve lost the majority of my practice time, but I don’t dare to tell Mr N. that I didn’t use the studio, as he had already delicately conveyed his feelings about my not using the studio he had booked for me yesterday.

When I get back with the map and the address written in Japanese, it’s a simple matter to get directions, and of course it turns out that the studio is in a multi-storey office building outside which I had been walking up and down earlier. The ‘Lesson Hall’ turns out to be yet another little studio somehow wedged into the space between the caretaker’s office and the stairwell, well set back from the street, and completely unguessable from the outside of the building. Hearing my steps, the caretaker rushes in smiling and bowing, though I am over an hour late. After she’s gone, I notice a bunch of white flowers wrapped up, with bows, on a table by the piano. They can’t be meant for me, surely? I have no idea whether to take them or leave them – either could cause offence. Eventually I leave them, hoping that she will retrieve them. At the end of the practice my hands are hurting again like they did in the Yamaha shop, I don’t know why. Could this still be the effect of jet lag?

In the evening, I attend a ‘twilight concert’ in the Hilton Plaza, a vast gleaming atrium with marble floors, glass and steel walls with cylindrical lifts whizzing up and down in them. In the midst of all this space-age chic, two Japanese girls dressed like 1930s film stars are playing duets on a Steinway grand piano.

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