Honeybees and Distant Thunder

Honeybees & Distant Thunder / Riku Onda
trans. from the Japanese by Phillip Gabriel
London: Doubleday, 2023, c2016.
423 p.

This was an unusual read, quite different from some of the darker or stranger Japanese books that I've read recently. It's set during a high-level international piano competition in Japan, and focuses on four of the competitors over the course of the two week competition.

Aya was a child prodigy who left performance when her mother died but is now tentatively re-entering the professional milieu once again. Masaru is an American based Japanese pianist who is the upcoming star of the piano world - and unknown to both Masaru and Aya, he's also Mak-un, a childhood friend who will be reunited with Aya at the competition. 

And then there's Jin, a wildly original teenaged pianist who doesn't even own a piano. He travels around France with his beekeeping father, but was spotted by the late Maestro Von Hoffman and became a protegé. 

Added to these three young people struggling to make their mark in an intense competition, we meet Akashi: he's older and married, working in a music store, but driven to try one more time to compete in the piano world. There's an "underdog" documentary being filmed about his journey, by an old friend who's now a filmmaker. 

As each of them throws themselves entirely into the competition we follow their development, both musically and internally. 

This book delves into the personal lives of each of these characters, but it's not about romance or quirky people interacting, it's really about Art and ambition and being true to a gift. There is a great deal of talk about the experience of playing in performance - how each one approaches their recitals, the visuals they imagine for their pieces, the universality of music and so on. There's discussion of particular classical composers and their pieces so if you know those pieces you can form your own opinions! Other characters like the judges also play a role in reflecting on the professional classical music world, its expectations and limitations, and the differences in how music is seen by various people in that world. This is a cerebral book as much as an emotionally driven one. 

Anyone who loves classical music should find this book absorbing. But there's also a lot of great content just about personal fulfillment, the meaning of a life, and art in general to appeal to a wider readership as well. I really liked it and enjoyed following the characters through their hothouse world of a prestige competition.