Chapter 2: The Packet of Forgotten Talent

Kenji returned to the store on Monday.

He told himself he was just buying cigarettes, even though he'd quit eight years ago. The store was exactly where he'd left it, which shouldn't have been remarkable but somehow was, as though he'd half-expected it to vanish like a dream that dissolves upon waking.

Ms. Sakamoto was reading a paperback behind the counter. She didn't look up.

"The novel didn't work out," Kenji said.

"They rarely do. Second chances give you the raw material. They don't give you the twenty years of living you'd need to use it properly." She turned a page. "It's in the terms and conditions. Very small print."

"There were no terms and conditions."

"Exactly. Very small."

On the shelf nearest the register, between a box of tissues and something labeled CONFIDENCE (Tropical Flavor, Limited Edition), sat a small foil packet: FORGOTTEN TALENT -- Just Add Water. Warning: Results may vary from expectations.

"What does this one do?" Kenji asked, already reaching for it.

"Gives back one talent you abandoned. Piano lessons you quit. The language you stopped studying. The sport you dropped." Ms. Sakamoto finally looked up. "The thing your mother signed you up for that you hated at the time but would kill for now."

Kenji thought of his mother, who had died three years ago, and of the piano that had sat in their living room like a wooden reproach. She'd paid for lessons until he was fourteen, when he'd announced he'd rather die than play another scale.

He hadn't thought about this in decades.

"How much?"

"350 yen."

He mixed the powder into a bottle of water at home. It tasted faintly of chalk and old wood.

Then he sat at his kitchen table -- he didn't own a piano -- and placed his hands flat on the surface.

His fingers knew.

Not just scales. Not just the clumsy Chopin nocturne he'd mangled at his last recital. His fingers held the muscle memory of a pianist who had practiced every day for twenty-eight years -- the years he'd wasted.

He found a music studio in Ikebukuro that rented rooms by the hour. When he played, the Steinway responded as though it had been waiting for him. A woman in the next room opened her door to listen. Then the studio owner. Then two students.

Kenji played Debussy's "Clair de Lune," and it was, without exaggeration, the most beautiful thing he had ever produced with his own body.

He cried again. This was becoming a habit.

He rented the room three more times that week. He recorded himself and played it back at night, amazed. He began looking up competition deadlines, concert venues, age requirements --

And then, on Friday, his left hand seized up.

Not cramp. Something deeper. His ring finger and pinky curled inward and would not straighten. A doctor used the word "dystonia" and explained it was common in musicians who practiced intensively without conditioning.

"But I've been playing for less than a week," Kenji protested.

"Your hands say otherwise," the doctor replied, frowning at the calluses. "These are the hands of someone who's played for decades."

Of course. The talent had come with the mileage.

Twenty-eight years of phantom practice, compressed into five days. His tendons had aged accordingly.

That night, Kenji sat in his apartment flexing his damaged hand, listening to the recording on his phone. The Debussy floated through the thin walls, and his neighbor's cat stopped snoring long enough to listen.

He sounded extraordinary.

He would never play again.