The Forest of Wool and Steel

Those who listen to music often fail to realize just how much the quality of sound depends on the tuning of the instrument. Between musician and tuner there exists an intricate bond, rendered by the author through the imagery of magpies. In an ancient Chinese legend, magpies form a bridge across the Milky Way between the stars Vega and Altair on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month: celestial lovers, sorrowful in their separation, who on that day can finally unite in the fulfillment of a great love. Sound—an inexplicable and captivating creation of both nature and man—lies at the heart of this novel. Tomura is a high school student living in an isolated mountain town; for him, it was enough to

. It would have been sufficient for him merely to contemplate, year after year, the miracle of spring in the mountains, when “the bare trees all bud at once.” (...)

. His life changes when a piano tuner arrives to service the school’s modest piano. Watching the man work, Tomura chooses this vocation. He enrolls in a vocational school and is subsequently hired by a musical instrument firm. At first an apprentice accompanying more experienced colleagues on client visits, he is gradually—and not without setbacks—permitted to work on his own.

Once again, the turning point erupts from the outside. He attends a piano performance by the very young Kazune and is entranced, captivated by the music and by the girl's playing.

. And an episode from his childhood comes back to him. As a boy, he was walking in the woods when he saw lights that

Listening to Kazune's music, Tomura is certain that somewhere in the mountains, in a place unknown to him, a tree was glowing. Love, unreserved and unconditional—a feeling that expects nothing in return—compels Tomura to overcome his self-doubt and become a concert tuner, in service of Kazune, the piano, and music itself.

It is undeniably a Bildungsroman. Tomura learns a trade while simultaneously coming of age. Aided by a workplace environment that is benevolent, perhaps beyond plausibility, the young man comes to understand that his humble, rustic mountain origins are not an impediment; rather, they grant him a stubborn tenacity that will prove to be his strength. Up to this point, it might seem a conventional narrative, woven from protracted dialogues with colleagues who dispense “nuggets of wisdom,” and weighted down by technical minutiae regarding the art of tuning—intriguing yet redundant curiosities. What endows the novel with an original and compelling dimension is that sense of the magical arising from the juxtaposition of the piano's sound with the lights and murmurs of the forest: a Shinto-inflected touch quintessential to Japanese culture, possessing nothing of the Romantic nor of the trivially pantheistic. While the piano is an invention of nineteenth-century Europe, its sweet melody and luminous atmosphere evoke sensations of the forest that our own positivistic and idealistic culture has forsaken for centuries. Beneath its ostensibly realistic veneer, the tale beckons us to achieve harmony with the Universe, guided by music.

The narrative style is spare, almost minimalist: short sentences, sparing with adjectives—fitting, after all, for a narrator in his early twenties who was never particularly gifted in school. The recurring allusion to Hara Tamiki, where the poet of the Holocaust defines the complex ambiguity of style, signals that the prose’s simplicity is a deliberate aesthetic choice by the author, and an entirely successful one. Paraphrasing Tamiki, we might say:

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Why read it? Luminous, quiet, replete with love and nostalgia.