Hailed in Taiwan as a “writer’s writer,” Chiang-Sheng Kuo has published many books of fiction and nonfiction since his debut short story appeared in United Daily in 1981. Coming of age in 1980s Taiwan, Kuo, a second-generation mainlander and a gay man, found his soul tribe through reading Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Taipei People by Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇). After earning a PhD in drama from NYU, he returned to Taiwan in 2000 to teach creative writing and after a thirteen-year interval since his previous novel, published his short story collection Nightly (夜行之子, Unitas) in 2010, followed by two novels dealing with questions of identity and queer literature. Life turned full circle as his bestselling novel, The Piano Tuner, was awarded the 2021 United Daily Literature Award and became his first book to be translated into English.
Not a typical novel about music, The Piano Tuner uses musical themes and musicians’ stories to experiment with different narrative forms of literary fiction. The original title in Chinese is 尋琴者 (Ecus, 2020), which can be translated as “a piano seeker.” The Chinese title invites a double reading because the second character qin (琴, piano) is a homonym of the character qing (情), which includes several meanings like emotion, love, feelings, and mood. Taking the wordplay into account, the title character, known to English readers only through his job, can in Chinese also be recognized as a piano seeker in search of love. Even though the love aspect of the Chinese title appears to be lost in translation, the mood of love transcends the language barrier like music, for the emotional atmosphere of the book is infused with hybrid aesthetics that invoke this sentiment.
Meshing personal memory and musical anecdotes, the piano tuner is the epitome of the unreliable narrator as he spins time around and switches between first- and third-person narrative. Our narrator, the piano tuner, is a fortysomething man who uses a cap to cover his bald spots and feels undeserving of his musical talent. He claims he knows little about metafiction, but he likens music performance to fiction writing, the piano tuner to the narrator: “If a musician is unhappy with a particular performance, the tuner must share the blame. If a story fails to please or earn the reader’s trust, the narrator is to be held partly responsible.” To be a responsible first-person narrator, he decides to sprinkle the story about the widower Lin san with his personal history.
The piano tuner’s veteran father lost part of his vision during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958, moved the family to a shantytown in Taipei, and opened a dumpling place to support the household. The narrator knew that he had failed his father’s expectations by not attending the military academy. His musical talent, discovered by the schoolteacher Ms. Chiu, however, was viewed by his father as “a ticking time bomb, a threat that one day his prodigal son would abandon him.” He learned to humble himself, suppressing his musical talent as well as his same-sex desire. He tries to win us over by stating: “As a narrator, what else do I have to reveal about myself? I mean, except for the fact that I was a musical genius?” But despite these overtures to the reader, the narrator stays in the closet, remaining unnamed for most of the book, and preferring to present himself solely as a piano tuner so he can protect the memories of an unrequited infatuation that is long gone.
Despite his self-loathing, the piano tuner likes to talk and peppers the story with his knowledge of pianos, his notes about classical musicians and pianists—Beethoven, Schubert, Sviatoslav Richter, and Glenn Gould—and of course, his meditations on music and love. The novel opens with his soulful mythmaking:
In the beginning, we were souls without bodies. When God planned to give us souls a physical shape, we refused to enter into a concrete form that would fall ill and grow old, obstructing our free passage through time and space. God came up with a solution by having angels play enchanting music.
As if recalling his duty as a storyteller, the tuner directs our attention to Rachmaninoff’s enchanting music “heard through Lin san’s ears,” identifying with the soul of the widower to whom he is highly sympathetic. Not only does he observe Lin san’s “silvery, wavy hair,” he also notes the strong desire in the latter’s “passive tone.”
If the piano tuner gives a fickle voice to this book, his characterization is highlighted by his foil, Lin san. The Japanese honorific -san in his nickname embellishes Lin san’s upbringing with oriental colors, since his father was a doctor who could afford a Yamaha piano during Japanese rule. A self-made businessman, Lin san built an export empire selling plastic chairs during the economic boom of the 1980s and learned to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle, including driving a Ferrari and wearing Armani suits. His confidence and composure make him popular among women. After his wife Emily’s untimely death, Lin san, very well-kept at sixty, needs to sort out the music studio and several pianos left by his musician wife. His first encounter with the piano tuner happens when he overhears Rachmaninoff’s “Song without Words” played by the tuner in the studio. The music evokes in Lin san memories of Emily, who had played the same piece during their first meeting and “the melody was etched on his mind.” Knowing that the tuner still checks on Emily’s pianos, Lin san wonders if the Steinway grand piano he bought for her is out of tune and plans to invite the tuner over to examine it. Little does Lin san know that the Steinway will evoke in the tuner memories of a distant one-sided love, just as the Rachmaninoff piece had once conjured similar memories in his own soul.
Mirroring and doubling emerge as the book’s central themes as the tuner examines the Steinway and remembers his youthful infatuation. Invited by Emily to tune her pianos at her studio, the tuner witnesses her affair with a younger man with a ponytail. Emily’s disinterest triggers in the tuner memories of being the oblivious one in a relationship during his youth. When the narrator turned seventeen, fairy godmother Ms. Chiu introduced him to her friend, a concert pianist who had returned from New York to teach in Taipei. The pianist, twice his age, embodied all the traits the boy aspired to achieve—great talent, a small degree of fame, impeccable taste, and a natural sophistication acquired in New York. The boy played Rachmaninoff’s “Song without Words” for the pianist, stunned by the latter’s “frank and open gaze.” When asked by the pianist what was on his mind, the boy replied snow—something he only saw in movies, lacking the vocabulary to describe the thousand butterflies in his stomach. But the pianist has the words the boy is missing: “The thing you can’t describe is time. Music lets us hear time pass and it lets us hear our shadows.”
Armed with the pianist’s words, the boy understands the budding feeling in his heart is love. The pianist teaches the boy to pay attention to frequency vibrations because “those who are luckiest can find, in this vast world, a vibration that can awaken the resonance with their past, present, and future.” He also teaches the boy to listen to music, to feel Richter’s tranquility, to appreciate Gould’s quirkiness. When the boy wonders if Gould “stopped playing concerts to declare a severance from what he loved most,” the pianist comes undone. Soon, the boy becomes too fond of the pianist to read the situation clearly, as when the pianist jokingly asks him to play a four-handed duet during his concert. The boy projected much of himself onto their connection until he catches the pianist French-kissing a blond man. To release his anger the boy scratches the surface of the pianist’s Steinway piano before running away from the scene. Later, the pianist died of “a strange illness” (AIDS) in the early 1990s, so the boy’s love remains untainted and forever in the past. But that boy has become a man now, and he works as a piano tuner with belated remorse, looking for the Steinway he had defaced years ago.
A sympathetic observer, the tuner decides to take Lin san under his wing. Not only does he see himself in Lin san, but he sees that “his loneliness, his sense of loss, and his lackluster marriage to Emily seemed to have become, for me, an inescapable responsibility.” He reads Lin san as another “lonely black key” abandoned by a musician and wants to protect him forever from the truth of Emily’s affair. The blurry boundary between self and other makes the tuner too invested in Lin san’s life. Yet the two men are bonded because of music and a shared fate. The same piece by Rachmaninoff can find resonance in two strangers and let two souls communicate through vibrations. The tuner was abandoned by the pianist the way Lin san was abandoned by Emily: two middle-aged men share the same fate of not being chosen by the one they love. To keep the music studio alive, the tuner suggests Lin san to transform it into a store of used pianos, and because of this, they need to visit “the center of piano reconstruction and secondhand retail.”
New York is the place that the tuner identifies as the pianist’s spiritual home, and he wants to follow the footsteps of the specter that has imprisoned his heart for years. But it is also the place that Lin san learned of the truth of his marriage. Despite having a study on the East Coast, Emily was reluctant to visit the city with her husband, as if New York was sealed off in her mind for a reason. Lin san promptly accepts the tuner’s suggestion, in the hope that seeing the city from another musical person’s perspective may help him reconcile with the past. The two men seize the opportunity to visit many tourist attractions and piano stores. And yet, even the memory we cherish the most may be hard to keep intact. The tuner reminds us that, “As time goes by, the memory might possibly become inaccurate or twisted, thus transformed into a kind of aural hallucination.” As the tuner reconstructs the pianist’s life in New York, he is greeted with his first snowfall. Observing the snow, he senses that he can hear “faint low notes hanging in the air, like vibrations from the throats of chanting monks.” The spiritual appreciation of the beauty and quietude of snow is certainly evocative of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country.
After spending so much time together, the tuner gradually begins to project his feelings onto Lin san, sending him small gifts and sharing hugs. At one point in the novel, the two men are having dinner in a restaurant when a ponytailed man, once Emily’s student and lover, approaches to greet Lin san. Lin san introduces the tuner as his “partner,” a phrase that secretly moves the tuner given that to him, “partner” is an endearing term reserved for gay couples. From then on, he continues to observe Lin san, looking for traces of love in his words. However, on their way to the largest secondhand piano wholesaler in upstate, Lin san abruptly announces that he would not accompany the tuner to the end of their journey, because he needed to visit his first wife and their son in Philadelphia. Soon after walking into this “enormous piano cemetery,” the tuner “felt the joy of a whale that has finally located a deserted island where its dying companions have gathered, wishing it had happened earlier.” To let out the ghosts of the Steinway pianos, of Emily, and of the pianist, the tuner loses control of himself and bangs a piano with a hammer. Only here do we learn that the tuner was expelled from a music school because he purposely destroyed the school’s pianos. Aside from being a fine tuner, he is a serial piano executioner.
The reconciliation comes late in the book, but it comes with a good omen. On a cold winter night in New York, the tuner receives an email from Ms. Chiu, who wrote down all the things she wished to share but couldn’t do in person. She even proposes a side hustle for the tuner in case he becomes jobless: there are several grand pianos at her school that he could help to maintain in the future. One of them is a damaged Steinway left by the pianist. Reading that email, the tuner wonders, “Who released the specter in that piano, so it could travel around the world to find me?” Twenty-five years after he defaced the pianist’s Steinway, he finally knows its whereabouts. The search will come to an end soon.
After losing himself in the warehouse, the tuner is all alone now. Instead of flying back to Taiwan, he decides to stop by Moscow to visit Richter’s memorial apartment. Since Richter’s favorite was Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in G major, he even reads through the sheet before the visit. But the memorial apartment shows no trace of Richter’s late life; instead, it is an unambiguous, man-made tourist attraction. Even the pianos on display are not the pianist’s favorite Yamahas, but two Steinways. In this anticlimactic moment, we can almost hear Henry James whisper: “I’m afraid there are moments in life when even Schubert has nothing to say to us.” But the worst doesn’t happen. With the melody of Schubert in his mind, the piano tuner doesn’t want to startle the Steinways from their long slumber. The ghosts that were once imprisoned in the pianos have all been let out. Now he is finally free and can choose to walk into “the blanketing snow” that has brought him to his destination.
