Ichika Matsumoto (Age 17, Violin Prodigy)
I realize, standing there on the stage, that I do not know if I will get the chair. I do not know if I will be first violin or last chair or sent home with a “thank you for your time.”
My mother, Reiko, is the sun. I am merely the planet trying not to fall into her corona and burn up. She sits in the back of every lesson, arms crossed, head tilted. She doesn’t smile when I play a passage perfectly. She only uncrosses her arms. That is her applause. Yesterday, I played Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. It took me three years to get the left-hand pizzicato clean. When I finished, the sensei nodded. My mother looked at her watch. ichika matsumoto pov
“The vibrato in the third variation was uneven,” she said on the train ride home. “You rushed the descent.”
My name is Ichika Matsumoto, and I am a ghost in my own body. Ichika Matsumoto (Age 17, Violin Prodigy) I realize,
It sounds like freedom.
And then, for the first time in my life, I do not play the notes she taught me. I do not play Paganini or Bach or Tchaikovsky. She sits in the back of every lesson,
I play the sound of the train tracks at 5:47 AM. The hollow rhythm of waiting. I play the sound of my mother’s silence after a perfect run. I play the whisper of my classmates, the soft rustle of Tanaka’s paperback pages, the imagined warmth of a hand I have never held.