murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

most. Then I'd have her play the piece again, and her performance
would be ten times better than the first. She would see for
herself what worked best and bring those features into her own
playing."
Reiko paused for a moment, observing the glowing end of her
cigarette. I went on eating my grapes without a word.
"I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than
me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought,
,if only she had started out with a good teacher and received the
proper training, she'd be so much farther along!' But I was wrong. She
wasn't the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just
happen to be people like that. They're blessed with this marvellous
talent, but they can't make the effort to systematize it. They end up
squandering it in little bits and pieces. I've seen my share of people
like that. At first you think they're amazing. They can sight-read some
terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the
way through. You see them do it, and you're overwhelmed. You think,
"I could never do that in a million years.' But that's as far as it goes.
They can't take it any further. And why not? Because they won't put in
the effort. They haven't had the discipline pounded into them. They've
been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they've been able to
play things well without any effort and they've had people telling them
how great they are from an early age, so hard work looks stupid to
them. They'll take some piece another kid has to work on for three
weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher assumes they've
put enough into it and lets them go on to the next thing. And they do
that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out
what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a
crucial element required for character building. It's a tragedy. I myself
had tendencies like that, but fortunately I had a very tough teacher, so
I kept them in check.
"Anyway, it was a joy to teach her. Like driving down the highway in
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