There is a café near Porta Saragozza in Bologna where someone is always practicing upstairs. You never see who it is. You hear scales through the ceiling, then a passage from something you almost recognize, then the scales again. I was sitting there with the Japanese edition of this book, and the pianist upstairs started what I think was Chopin — one of the ballades — and stopped in the middle of a phrase. Started again. Stopped again. I was reading Onda’s description of Jin Kazama walking onto a stage for the first time, and the person upstairs was doing exactly what Onda was writing about: trying to find the place where the music lives inside the notes. I put my coffee down and just listened to both of them at once.
That is the experience this novel is trying to give you. For roughly four hundred pages, Onda Riku asks you to hear piano music through written Japanese, and for long stretches she succeeds at something that should be impossible. The Yoshigae International Piano Competition is fictional, but the pieces are real — Chopin, Liszt, Bartók, Prokofiev, Bach — and Onda writes their performance not as description but as event. You are in the hall. The air changes. A sixteen-year-old boy who has never owned a piano puts his hands on the keys and the room tilts.
Jin Kazama is the book’s most extraordinary creation and its most dangerous one. He is the son of a beekeeper, he has been raised on sound rather than conservatory training, and he carries a letter of recommendation from a dead maestro that amounts to a dare: I am sending you a gift — or perhaps a disaster. Onda gives him the quality that the best writing about music always reaches for — the sense that genius is not skill pushed further but something alien to skill entirely, something that hears the world differently and cannot explain why. In the Japanese, Jin’s speech is plain, almost childlike, Tokyo-standard without affectation, and this is part of his meaning. He is not performing anything, not even ordinariness. He simply is what he is, and when he plays, everyone else in the novel has to decide what that means for them.
The danger is that a character like this can become a symbol instead of a person, and Onda does not entirely escape it. Jin is wonderful when he is arranging the angle of a piano on a stage because the sound needs to go somewhere different, or when he is walking through a city listening to it the way other people look at paintings. He is less convincing when the novel needs him to carry its thesis about nature and music and the sounds the world makes before humans organize them into art. The bees in the title are beautiful in the Japanese — 蜜蜂 has a sweetness in the mouth that “honeybees” does not — but they are asked to do too much thematic work. By the third time a character reflects on the connection between natural sound and musical genius, the insight has stopped being an insight and become a position paper.
Aya Eiden is the novel’s real emotional center, though Onda does not present her that way. Aya was a prodigy. Her mother died. She vanished from the stage for seven years. Now she is back, and the competition is not really about winning — it is about whether she can play at all, whether the music is still inside her or whether grief silenced it permanently. This is a story I have encountered many times in Japanese fiction, the return after loss, and Onda handles it with restraint that surprised me. Aya’s fear is physical. It lives in her hands. And when she finally plays her first-round piece and the fear does not win, Onda does not celebrate. She simply moves to the next contestant’s performance, and the reader is left holding Aya’s relief alone, without the novel underlining it. That is fine writing.
Masaru Carlos Levi Anatole — half Japanese, half Peruvian, Juilliard-trained, tall, handsome, technically flawless — is the character the novel likes least and treats most fairly. He is talented enough to win anything, and the question Onda poses through him is whether supreme competence is the same as artistry. The answer she arrives at is more generous than I expected. Masaru is not a foil. He is a musician who has worked brutally hard for everything Jin was given by accident, and the novel respects that work even as it suggests that work alone does not produce what Jin produces. There is a passage in the second round where Masaru plays Liszt and Onda writes his performance as architecture — precise, loadbearing, luminous — and then Jin plays the same piece and she writes it as weather. The comparison is not kind to Masaru, but it is honest.
Akashi Takashima, the fourth contestant, is twenty-eight, works in a music store, and knows he is too old and too ordinary for what he wants. He is the reader’s surrogate, and Onda uses him carefully. He is the one who notices what the others are too gifted to notice — that the audience is shifting in their seats, that the hall has a particular acoustic at three in the afternoon, that the piano tuner has done something unusual with the upper register. He gives the novel its ground. Without him, the book would float away on genius and abstraction.
The structural problem is the one every reader will notice: four hundred and thirty pages of a single piano competition, organized by rounds. Entry, Round One, Round Two, Round Three, Finals. Each round requires multiple performances. Each performance requires a description. Onda is inventive enough that the descriptions do not repeat — she finds a different register for almost every one, shifting between the performer’s interior, the audience’s reaction, a judge’s professional assessment, and occasionally the music itself as pure sensation. But the architecture constrains her. The competition format means the emotional rhythm of the novel is essentially a series of peaks with valleys of backstory and interpersonal scenes between them. By the third round, I knew exactly when the next peak was coming. The book never bored me — the prose is too alive for that — but it did become predictable in its unpredictability, if that makes sense. Every performance is a surprise, but the fact that a surprise is coming is not.
This is a four, and I mean it as real praise. Onda attempted something that most novelists would not dare — a book whose central event is people sitting at a piano, one at a time, playing music the reader cannot hear — and she made it work. The book won both the Naoki Prize and the Japan Booksellers’ Award in the same year, the first novel to do so, and neither prize was wrong. It is a genuinely ambitious novel by a writer with an extraordinary ear for the cadence of Japanese prose. Its limitations are the limitations of its form: the competition structure that gives it shape also gives it a ceiling.
The translation is where I have trouble.
Philip Gabriel is one of the most experienced Japanese-to-English translators working today. He has translated Murakami for decades. He knows what he is doing. And the music descriptions that are the heart of the book come across in English with considerable force. When Onda writes a performance as landscape or weather or memory, Gabriel finds English that moves at roughly the right speed and lands in roughly the right place. This is not nothing. It is, in fact, the most important thing the translation had to get right, and it gets it right often enough.
What it loses is everything around the music.
In the Japanese, each character speaks in a distinct register. Jin’s plain Tokyo-standard. Aya’s careful, slightly formal sentences that betray her conservatory upbringing even when she is trying to sound casual. Masaru’s bilingual looseness — he thinks in patterns that are not entirely Japanese. Akashi’s ordinary salaryman speech, the voice of a man who knows he does not belong in this company. Gabriel himself has acknowledged in interviews that the composer Hishinuma’s rough downtown Tokyo dialect — shitamachi speech, blunt and combative — does not survive the crossing into English. But it is not only Hishinuma. In Gabriel’s English, everyone sounds roughly the same. The social textures that tell a Japanese reader exactly who is speaking and what world they come from, the registers, the formality levels, the gendered patterns, are all flattened into competent, readable, undifferentiated American English prose.
This matters more than it might in another novel, because Honeybees and Distant Thunder is a book about the difference between musicians. Onda’s whole argument is that Jin and Masaru and Aya hear music differently because they are different, and in the Japanese, that difference lives in how they speak and think, not only in how they play. When the speech flattens, the argument loses a leg. You can still see the differences in what they do at the piano. You can no longer hear them in the silence between performances.
The title is another small loss. 遠雷 — enrai — is a word with a particular weight in Japanese. It means thunder heard from far away, and it carries a feeling of summer, of something approaching, of weather that has not yet arrived. The compound is compact and slightly literary. “Distant Thunder” is an accurate translation and a reasonable one, but it is two words where the Japanese has one, and the one Japanese word does something the two English words do not: it holds the distance and the thunder together as a single sensation. This is not Gabriel’s fault. English does not have the word. But the loss is there.
I would give this translation a six. Gabriel did serious, professional work. The music crosses. The characters cross, diminished. The speech does not cross. For a novel this dependent on the distinction between voices, that is a significant cost.
The book, though,, the book is the real thing. Read it in Japanese if you can. If you cannot, read it in English and know that you are hearing the piano clearly, even if the conversations in the lobby are harder to make out. Onda Riku wrote a novel about sound, and the sound is still there.
Book Rating: 4/5
Translation Rating: 6/10
— Misako Mikami