The word lessons appeared repeatedly throughout the notebooks left behind by piano instructor Kenji Nakamura, who taught children from the apartment he shared with his wife Aiko and their youngest daughter Emi during the economic downturn of the late 1980s.
Parents from neighboring buildings used to line the hallway waiting for afternoon lessons.
Then children started refusing to enter the apartment.
Emi Nakamura and the Practice Room
Seven details remained behind to explain the family after the apartment was abandoned: Kenji’s reading glasses resting on top of old sheet music; Aiko’s cardigan hanging behind the kitchen door; Emi’s cassette player abandoned beside the piano bench; a cracked metronome stuck between tempos; unpaid electricity bills folded beneath a ceramic ashtray; damp footprints leading repeatedly toward the storage balcony; and a final sentence written shakily inside Kenji’s lesson planner reading, “Do not continue the exercises once Emi starts hearing the wrong notes upstairs.”
Nobody in the building understood what he meant.
Several former students later claimed strange piano sounds started coming through the apartment ceiling after midnight shortly after severe water leaks spread through the building during monsoon season. According to local rumor, the apartment above the Nakamuras had been empty for years.
Emi reportedly stopped sleeping in her bedroom afterward.
Neighbors claimed she spent entire nights listening beside the piano with the lights turned off.
The Month the Water Started Dripping Through the Ceiling
The Nakamura family decline accelerated after severe plumbing failures flooded several apartments in the building during a typhoon season that lasted almost three weeks. Elevators stopped working repeatedly. Entire floors smelled permanently damp.
Yet residents later claimed piano music still came from the Nakamura apartment every night after midnight.
Several neighbors reported hearing someone practicing scales upstairs despite the apartment above remaining officially vacant.
Then Emi vanished.
Kenji and Aiko disappeared two nights later.
When authorities eventually entered the Nakamura apartment months later, everything inside appeared mostly untouched.
The dishes were still in the sink.
The laundry still hung near the balcony.
And the piano bench remained pulled slightly away from the keys.
The final page of Kenji Nakamura’s lesson planner mentioned the lessons only once more before ending abruptly:
“Something upstairs kept asking Emi to play the song again.”
