Light off the pond slanted in through the archive window. The last afternoon before April gave way to May. The air was mild, carrying a faint dampness .
Keromi kept running her pencil along the margin of the sheet music, stopping again and again at the same measure. Erase. Write again. A little hill of eraser shavings had built up on the desk. She’d decided last week to write a song that would still be around ten years from now — but today, the act of “writing” itself was strangely binding her hands.
The door opened, and Kopo’s head poked through. “Can I come in? Everyone out in the plaza's banging on something. It’s loud.” “Sure.”
Kopo sat down at the edge of a shelf and started idly twirling a small twig he’d apparently picked up along the way. After a while, Keromi noticed that his fingers had quietly settled into a rhythm. Three beats, then a half-beat pause. An odd interval.
But somewhere in that interval was the very gap in sound Keromi had been searching for, all this time.
“…Hey, keep doing that.” “Huh? I’m not doing anything.”
Still, Kopo’s fingers didn’t stop.
Keromi set down her pencil and opened her mouth. A sound came out — one that wasn’t written on the sheet music. It was a voice like the old book spines lined up along the archive’s walls, swaying in the afternoon light. The smell of the pond seemed to deepen just slightly.
“Feh-feh.”
Sonchō’s laugh drifted in from outside the door. It seemed he’d been listening in. “A sound that gets a reply lives longer than a sound that gets written down. That’s just how it is.”
By evening, Keromi tried to transcribe today’s sound onto the sheet music, and stopped. The moment she set it down on the five lines, something felt like it would die.
Kopo had already gone home. On the desk, only the eraser shavings remained.
Margin note: The next morning, Kopo tilted his head and asked, “Was I playing something back then?” — but his fingers were already tapping out that same rhythm again.
【Today’s Drop】
- International Jazz Day (April 30): A UNESCO-designated day honoring the culture of dialogue and coexistence fostered by jazz improvisation , marked by concerts and sessions held around the world.
- Library Anniversary: Established by the Japan Library Association to commemorate the promulgation of the Library Law on April 30, 1950 — a day for reconsidering the meaning of recording, preserving, and passing things on.
This is an English translation of “書けなかった音”, part of Tales of Amencho Town (蛙鳴町奇譚).