Tokyo: The Manga Begins with the Funeral of Frilian

There was an object wrapped in kraft paper placed by the door, one corner of which was wet with snow.

The sender's name was Yuma Kamiya.

After receiving the package, he weighed it in his hand.

It's not very heavy.

The script and storyboard are about 200 pages long.

The fireplace still retains some warmth.

When he got to the stove, he took the package.

Throw it into the fire.

Then he saw a corner of the storyboard peeking out.

The area got wet because of the snowmelt.

The ink lines are slightly smudged.

However, the image can still be clearly identified.

Tombstone, shadow, and the person standing in front of the tombstone.

They are elves.

He pulled his hands back.

The package was opened.

Turn to the second page.

  

.........

A day or two later, the doorbell of Qianlong Villa rang again.

Joe Hisaishi himself opened the door.

His clothes were gray, and his hair was completely white compared to when he made a public appearance three years ago.

The fingers were dry, but very long.

Looking at the three people at the door.

But then he turned around and went inside.

"Come in. It's cold outside."

Yuma Kamiya and Shiori Shirakawa changed into slippers.

Walk along the corridor.

The villa was dark inside, and the curtains were drawn.

There was a light on in a room at the end of the corridor.

The music room.

A Steinway grand piano sits in the center of the room.

There wasn't a speck of dust on the piano lid.

There was a storyboard on the piano bench.

This is the one that Yuma Kamiya sent.

The manuscript paper was already very tattered from being read so many times.

A place on the periphery.

It was covered with dense annotations made in pencil.

Joe Hisaishi walked to the piano and sat down.

"In the storyboard you sent, the first episode doesn't have any dialogue at the beginning."

How would you spend those three minutes?

"sound."

Yuma Kamiya stated.

"The sound of the wind blowing through the grass. How fast the shadows of the clouds move as they cross the ground. And musical instruments like the clarinet."

"What kind of clarinet?"

Eight notes. Repeated variations. No more, no less.

Joe Hisaishi placed his fingers on the piano lid.

Do you know Keisuke Fujita?

"He is the producer of this animated film."

"Winter Stardust is a work by Fujita, and its music was written by my junior colleague."

Joe Hisaishi's voice remained unchanged.

"After he finished writing this score, he told me that he would never do animation scores again. He said the industry was in a very bad state."

"What investors wanted was a theme song that could be sold on CDs, not the music itself. The producer wanted a catchy chorus, not a melody. He said he spent eight months composing a symphonic suite, only to have it cut down to a three-minute pop song by a single sentence from an investor."

He turned his gaze to Yuma Kamiya.

"Tell me, what makes your animation different from others?"

Yuma Kamiya did not answer immediately.

He walked toward where the piano was located.

Then he reached out and picked up a stack of storyboards that were on the piano bench.

Then he turned to one of the pages.

"On this page, Frilian is watching the sunrise at the beach. There are no lines. Only the sound of the waves, the cries of the seagulls, and the image of the wind blowing through her hair. Fujita said he planned to use forty seconds for this scene. Nothing would happen in those forty seconds; there would only be a thousand-year-old elf standing on the beach, watching the sun rise."

He put the storyboard back on the piano bench.

"No one would sing this part at karaoke. No one would set the sound of ocean waves as their ringtone. But someone read the comic in a convenience store and then stood in front of the checkout counter crying for a long time. He remembered when he was a child, his grandmother took him to the beach to watch the sunrise. His grandmother has been gone for twenty years. He said that on that page, he could smell the mothballs on his grandmother again."

The music room was quiet for a moment.

"I don't care about CD sales."

Yuma Kamiya looked at Joe Hisaishi.

"The soundtrack I want doesn't need to be catchy. It just needs to remind someone watching TV of someone who's no longer here for a fleeting moment. Whether they cry or laugh afterward is their business."

Joe Hisaishi remained silent for a long time.

Then he opened the piano lid.

Fingers landed on the piano keys.

There was no audition, no hesitation.

Eight musical notes.

Starting from the middle C, it ascends to the A-flat.

Then walk back in the opposite direction.

The simplest interval, the simplest rhythm.

It's as if someone has walked a very, very long way and finally stopped.

Standing in front of someone's grave.

He opened his mouth as if to say something.

But then he realized he had forgotten how to speak.

The last note has ended.

Joe Hisaishi's fingers remained on the piano keys without moving.

"What would a thousand years sound like?"

He was asking himself.

Then his hand began to move.

The eight notes began to change.

When the variation first appears, the chord changes from a major key to a minor key.

The A flat is split into two semitones, just like someone splitting a sentence in half.

Half of it was swallowed, and the other half could not be spoken.

The second variation appears, with the bass notes from the left hand also joining in.

That wasn't background music; it sounded like footsteps, one after another, walking on the snow.

Each step lands on a different chord.

During the third variation, the melody suddenly rises an octave.

The melody became extremely gentle and also took on a very distant quality.

It's as if it's been passed down from a thousand years ago.

It's as if it's going to be passed down a thousand years from now.

Shiori Shirakawa stood at the entrance.

Her hands gripped tightly the cuffs of Yuma Kamiya's down jacket.

She had no idea when she had grabbed that sleeve.

The music stopped.

Joe Hisaishi's hands were still hovering above the piano keys.

Snowflakes continued to fall outside the window; in fact, they were falling with increasing force, gently landing on the tops of the cedar forest without making a sound—it was utterly quiet.

"All those worthless scores that I spent three years writing have been burned."

He spoke, his voice even hoarser than before.

"Because I suddenly realized that none of those scores were truly about people. They were all about heroes' triumphs, about passionate battles, about how light triumphs over darkness. But not one of them depicted the feeling of a person who has lived for a thousand years, standing silently in front of his lover's grave, wanting to cry but forgetting how to cry."

After saying that, he slowly closed the piano lid and then slammed it shut.

"This is not a hymn played when a hero returns in triumph. It is a lullaby that sounds like a lullaby but is actually a funeral dirge. It is a lullaby that lasts for a thousand years and has never had a climax, because for him, living itself is the greatest climax of life."