Character · Your Lie in April
Kousei Arima
A pianist who can still play perfectly and cannot hear a single note of it once he sits down.
In Otakana the clue reads: Pianist who cannot hear his own playing
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Your Lie in April
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Trained by his mother to be a human metronome, Kousei Arima won competitions by reproducing a score exactly, without deviation and without much of anything else. Her illness and her death broke the arrangement. Since then he sits at the piano, his hands work, and the sound simply stops reaching him partway through, which no doctor can find a cause for because there is nothing wrong with his ears.
The series is honest about where that came from. His mother's teaching was abusive, he loved her anyway, and both of those things stay true for the whole run. What he does with a piano afterwards is not a matter of recovering technique. It is a matter of deciding whether the instrument belongs to her or to him.
Kaori is the lever. She needs an accompanist, she does not accept excuses, and playing behind someone who ignores the score forces him to listen for a person rather than for notes. His friends Tsubaki and Watari fill in the ordinary teenage life he skipped, which the show uses to keep a story about grief from becoming unbearable.
Spelling KOUSEI
KOUSEI keeps the long vowel that most Japanese names lose in English. The kanji is 公生, and the held o is written OU here rather than dropped, so KOSEI is the near miss that costs a guess. Six letters, four of them vowels, and the tail SEI is one syllable rather than two. Otakana wants the given name rather than Arima.