Character · Your Lie in April
Kaori Miyazono
She plays the notes on the page when she feels like it, which is roughly never, and audiences forgive her every time.
In Otakana the clue reads: Violinist who plays however she wants
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Your Lie in April
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Kaori Miyazono enters a competition, ignores the score, and plays Saint-Saens as though the composer were in the room arguing with her. Judges mark her down. The audience will not stop clapping. That gap between what scores well and what people actually want to hear is the argument the whole series is having, and she is the side of it that plays loud.
She attaches herself to Kousei Arima, a former child prodigy who has not touched a piano in years, and refuses to let him keep hiding. Her method is not gentle. She bullies, drags, lies about small things, and puts him on stage with almost no notice, on the theory that a musician who has forgotten why they play needs an audience rather than a practice room.
Naoshi Arakawa serialised Your Lie in April in Monthly Shonen Magazine from 2011, and A-1 Pictures adapted it in 2014. The show is careful with its music, staging full performances rather than clips, so Kaori's playing has to carry scenes that a lesser production would have cut around. The title is a warning, and it is worth taking seriously.
Spelling KAORI
KAORI is five letters with three vowels, and the AO in the middle is where guesses go wrong, since English almost never runs those two together. Three beats, ka-o-ri, one sound per kana. The name means fragrance, 薫 or 香, and it belongs to the violinist rather than the pianist. Otakana wants the given name, not Miyazono.