Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett Page A

was Korean, and I because I was from the country. Most of the girls were from the major cities: Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka. They were here at Geidai because their parents wanted polished daughters who would either capture the eye of wealthy and accomplished husbands, or who could go back to their fancy neighborhoods to teach music. To be from the countryside, as we were, was to be an outsider forever. “How,” asked our roommate Sachiko, a soprano from the Ginza district of Tokyo, “did you even become interested in music?” We were in the large communal dining hall eating off heavy tables that had been there since the Meiji period.
    “Everyone
likes
music,” Shinobu said.
    “Yes, but most people where you are from become farmers, don’t they?”
    I tried to set my chopsticks down carefully, but they clattered and one rolled and fell to the floor. In Japan, a single chopstick is a bad omen. “You think you know what the countryside is from posters you see in train stations, don’t you? The world is not so well defined.”
    “Yes, but how did you even find a decent teacher?”
    “There are teachers everywhere,” I said.
    “Yes, but the best teachers stay in the cities. They study here, like we are doing now, then go back to their neighborhoods to teach the next group of students. And if they do come from the countryside, they don’t go
back
. So, how did you ever find a good enough teacher to get into Geidai?”
    I put my palms on the table to anchor my weight and began to stand up, but Shinobu put her hand on my knee and kept me in place. I looked at her,furious that she would prevent me from engaging Sachiko, but was startled to see her smiling that enchanting smile she’d used on the judges years ago in Akita. It was like being caught in a strong stage light and I was momentarily hypnotized into inaction.
    “What you say is true, of course. Satomi may not have had access to the best teachers. But that is also why students from the countryside, like her, are generally of a better caliber. It is only truly gifted musicians who come from the outside to end up at Geidai,” she finished sweetly. “Satomi must be truly talented, or else she could never compete with you.”
    That evening, as we ambled through the hallway back to our dorm room, she pulled me aside and told me that I would need to learn to work on my temper if I were to succeed in college. Could I not see, she asked, that Sachiko was a very literal girl, always playing everything note perfect and angry at herself if she missed a finger in a chord? “We must feel sorry for her,” Shinobu said. “It’s a terrible thing in life to be a limited person.”
    “Is it true?” I asked impatiently.
    “What?”
    “That only the very talented students from the countryside end up at Geidai?”
    She smiled. “They know that we will either fail miserably because we cannot adjust to their ways … because we get into fights”—she nodded meaningfully—“or that we will have something they can never have. They are afraid, Satomi.”
    The question of talent was widely discussed at Geidai. It was the magical secret ingredient that separated all of the students and because it could not be meted out, its existence was questioned, and sometimes argued like the life of the gods themselves. That Shinobu and I were strange and accomplished was taken for granted. But it remained to be seen whether or not we would be put in one camp or the other: the group of general students destined for careers in teaching, or that rare breed who might actually be artists.
    While there was plenty of speculation among the girls on the subject of talent, the teachers were unwilling to give any of us their formal blessing. I found this resistance to be troubling.
    “Your teachers have indulged you and let you play only what you wanted,” my piano instructor Uchihara-sensei said to me. She was a tiny woman in her seventies, and age had made her more brittle than frail,