Kaede

Kaede is twenty-two, a piano student by day, and four nights a week she plays the late set in a hotel bar thirty-odd floors above Nishi-Shinjuku. We invented her, and the bar with her. On paper the job is two hours at a baby grand with the city laid out behind the glass like something spilled. In practice the job is the requests, and she treats every one of them as a challenge somebody has been unwise enough to issue.

The first request comes on a folded napkin at twenty past nine and is always the same song, the one every hotel pianist on earth is asked for before ten. She plays it exactly as written, once, and plays it well. Then she hides it inside the next three tunes, a phrase at a time and in the wrong key, so that only the man who asked can hear it coming back. He always does. He always looks delighted and faintly accused.

The second is from a table of men in their fifties who want something fast. She gives them fast: an étude at a tempo her professor would fail her for, and the table spends the rest of the evening arguing about whether a person can actually do that. She scores this as a win on points.

The third is the one she waits for all night, and it is nobody asking for anything. Half past ten on a Wednesday, the bar a third full, the city at its most glittering and least interested. She plays what she is meant to be practising, a Ravel she cannot yet get through without a slip at bar forty, and gets through it or does not, with the whole of west Tokyo pretending not to listen.

The fourth is a dare, usually from a woman in an expensive coat: something Kaede cannot possibly know. Kaede asks her to hum it. Four bars in she has the tune, eight in she is improving it, and by the end it is recognisably the song and recognisably not, and the woman cannot decide which of them has won.

Twenty-two shows mainly in how badly she wants to win things that are not contests. She cuts her own fringe with nail scissors in the staff cloakroom, straight and slightly too short, and waits for someone to mention it. She cannot sit through a film. She keeps score in conversations the other person does not know are being scored, which makes her the character in this section we are least keen to tell about the vote.

When the lid comes down she walks to the station and reaches the platform with four minutes to spare, never more, because arriving with ten would be a waste of six.