The Piano in the Forest: A Journey of Music, Talent, and Rivalry

I should begin with a disclaimer: This is my first experience of manga (comics or graphic novels from Japan) and in anime (a style of Japanese film and television animation, typically aimed at adults as well as children) at that.

I typed “piano” in the Netflix search bar, and the anime version of the manga series ‘Forest of Piano’ (transliterated from the Japanese ‘Piano no Mori’ but which probably translates better as ‘The Piano in the Forest’) came up. Rated 13+, there are 24 half-hour episodes divided equally into two seasons.

What hooked me was the signature ‘tune’, Frédéric Chopin’s Étude in C major, Opus 10, number 1, that I wrote about in this column some years ago. It was also the theme tune for a television commercial (I no longer remember the product, just the music!) in the 1980s, and I still remember the ‘aha’ moment when I heard it played in full by a Soviet pianist at the Kala Academy in 1989. 

The other draw for me was the message that a disadvantaged child, if given the right milieu, training and encouragement from an early age, can reach the pinnacle of music achievement if they desire it. It aligned so much with our message at Child’s Play that despite the 24 episodes in Japanese (with English subtitles, not always well-translated) and quite a few suspensions of disbelief, I watched the entire series in instalments.   

‘Forest of Piano’ is the story of Kai Ichinose, raised by a single mother, a sex worker in the red-light district literally and figuratively on the fringes of society at the edge of a forest. He finds solace in a discarded grand piano that responds only to his touch, but is ‘dead’ when others play it.  He has a natural flair for the instrument despite the absence of formal training.

All that changes when a new student (Shuhei Aamamiya), born into privilege and the son of a famed concert pianist of yesteryear, transfers to Kai’s elementary school. Before long, Kai is noticed by Amamiya’s teacher Sosuke Ajino, another former concert pianist whose career had been tragically cut short by a car accident that killed his fiancée and injured his right hand. Ajino now makes a living as a teacher and, seeing Kai’s potential, agrees to teach him. Amamiya fights an inner battle with both admiration and loathing for Kai.

Long story short, and many episodes later, Kai Ichinose and Shuhie Amamiya enter the International Frédéric Chopin Piano competition in Warsaw, along with competitors from all over the world. I won’t spoil it for you, but I think you can guess what happens at the end. 

There is another underprivileged background contestant in the fictionalized competition: Wei Pang from China, an orphan who is taken in by a sadistic patron only to capitalize on his musical potential.  

Japanese manga illustrator and writer Makoto Isshiki’s inspiration for the series was a documentary showing Russian-born concert pianist Stanislav Bunin winning the International Frédéric Chopin Piano competition in 1985. 

I found the focus on competing, on getting ahead of a rival to win (apart from Kai, of course, and a few others) a little disconcerting. Maybe they were meant to be the counterfoil to Kai, but it did seem a little excessive. But that is the downside of competitions and competing in general. Music isn’t sport or a martial art, and even the latter two without sportsmanship are hollow ‘victories.’

The music fraternity also took issue with the impression given that raw genius could let one learn fiendishly difficult works, in Kai’s initial years, without any instruction, and even with no practice, but just by having heard the work once before. A rather dangerous message to be sending out. One heaved a sigh of relief when Ajino compels young Kai to labour at the formative piano exercises by Charles-Louis Hanon that all serious piano students have to learn as a rite of passage. 

It is the music that was the ultimate clincher for me, and urged me to soldier on from one episode to the next, to the end. The piano music of Chopin reigns supreme throughout, as one would expect if it leads up to the eponymous competition.  But one encounters the music of others too, notably Beethoven and Liszt. Some scenes are quite bizarre: Kai cross-dressed (as ‘Maria’) as piano-player in his mum’s brothel to earn his keep, but playing Liszt’s ‘Funérailles’, as background music to pole-dancers!  

Just the Chopin oeuvre, the wealth of études, sonatas, waltzes, mazurkas, polonaises, and the two piano concertos played by all the finalists make ‘Forest of Piano’ worth the watch and listen. You don’t hear them in their entirety, of course, and there are speaking voices (often the thoughts of the performers as they play) superimposed on the music some of the time. But I’d have given anything for such exposure in my childhood. 

What impressed me is the attention given to the music being played. The caption tells us the name of the work (sometimes referred to as ‘song’ in the transliteration from the Japanese), the movement, and the opus number, with sometimes its nickname (for example the ‘Minute’ waltz).

There is an intimate knowledge of the repertoire and the duration of play by each contestant at each round of the Chopin competition, and of the fact that the competition awards additional prizes for the ‘Polonaise’, ‘Mazurka’, and ‘Sonata’ categories.

Manga and anime fans have said it doesn’t compare as well with other music-themed anime series, notably ‘Kids on the Slope’ (focus on jazz), ‘Your Lie in April’ (piano) and ‘Sound! Euphonium’ (brass band). I can only comment on ‘Forest of Piano’ on its own merit. 

‘Forest of Piano’ second season centres around the competition, and anime fans feel that a lack of budget led to many ‘stills’ being used instead of animation, and CGI (computer-generated images) instead of hand-drawn ones.

The competition venues (interior and exterior) and Warsaw’s Frédéric Chopin Monument are lovingly illustrated.

Poland as a country however doesn’t get a fair depiction. The judges are shown as biased to their compatriots, and even the Prime Minister lambasts the jury panel’s head over the phone when the top prize, and even the Mazurka prize, are not won by a Pole. I can understand the need to write intrigue into the plot, but this went a little beyond the pale.

In real life, a Japanese pianist has never won the top prize at the International Chopin competition, although Mitsuko Uchida stood second in 1970, Yukio Yokoyama was third in 1990, and Kyotei Sorita second in 2021. 

Ignore the creases in the plotline, the awkward subtitle translations from time to time, and just take ‘Forest of Piano’ as a celebration of the classical piano repertoire.

More importantly than competing and ‘winning’ and ‘defeating’ another, if ‘Forest of Piano’ can inculcate a love for music and encourage a young viewer to work at their instrument for the sheer joy of making music, as its protagonist Kai Ichinose seems to do above all else, the series will have done a huge service to music. 

This article first appeared in The Navhind Times, Goa, India.