Chapter 1: Not Too High — 上げすぎない
# Part One: Recording the Margins
## Chapter 1: Not Too High
The clock in the shopping arcade read 6:42.
The sky had begun to brighten, but the lights under the arcade were still on, their white glow falling evenly across the row of closed shutters. Makoto Mizuno walked down the street with a friend, holding a small recorder in front of his chest.
Through the earphones, the shopping arcade before him sounded slightly different.
The low engine noise of a truck that had turned somewhere in the distance came closer between the buildings. It grew louder, then slowly moved off to the right after passing the intersection.
On the recorder’s screen, two level meters rose and fell with the engine. The green bars reached about halfway up, with a wide area of the display still above them.
“Couldn’t you turn that up a little?” said the friend walking beside him.
Mizuno removed one of the earphones.
“What?”
“The recording level. The meters aren’t going anywhere near the top. Wouldn’t it be a waste to record everything that low?”
His friend’s point was not hard to understand. If Mizuno raised the input, distant sounds and quiet voices would be recorded more clearly.
He put a finger on the input dial but did not turn it.
“Big sounds can come out of nowhere on this street.”
“It’s quiet now.”
“Now it is.”
In front of them, the shutter of an old coffee shop began to move.
A dry click came as the lock released, followed by the metal slats lifting. The joints between them folded one after another, and a low vibration spread up to the roof of the arcade.
Mizuno put the earphone back in. The shutter sounded thicker through the earphones than it had without them. Beneath the vibration, he could even hear dishes faintly rattling inside the shop.
A man who appeared to be the owner pushed the shutter upward with his back bent. When the last section rose, another man came out of the darkness inside. They exchanged a brief greeting, but when the ventilation fan started, their low voices were quickly buried under its low rush of air.
The red indicator on the record button was still lit.
At the far end of the arcade, a bicycle brake gave a short squeak. A bicycle loaded with newspapers came closer, and each time its front wheel crossed a seam in the tiles, small impacts came at regular intervals.
The deliveryman passed the two of them and stopped in front of a shop several doors down. A bound stack of newspapers was lifted from the rear rack and set on the ground. It made a low, dull sound.
“Is that the kind of thing you came to record?”
Mizuno thought for a moment.
“That too.”
“The sound of the newspapers hitting the ground?”
“Not just the newspapers. What comes before and after them too.”
When the deliveryman returned to the bicycle, the kickstand came up, one pedal turned once, and then the tires began to move.
Taken by itself, the instant the newspapers hit the ground was nothing more than an impact. The sound of the bicycle approaching came before it. The sound of the deliveryman heading toward the next shop remained after it. Mizuno wanted to listen again when a recording included what came before and after, rather than isolating a single sound.
“What do you use it for?”
“Nothing in particular, so far.”
“You don’t use it?”
“I listen sometimes.”
His friend laughed.
“That’s a strange hobby.”
Mizuno did not deny it.
He did not release the recordings as works, nor did he have any plans to use them in videos. He saved the audio files with the date and location attached.
A station square as rain began to fall. An underground mall after closing. An evening park after the children had gone. A market before opening. The inside of a coffee shop, cups touching saucers.
He wanted to preserve something. But if someone asked what, he could not name just one thing, any more than he could single out the sound of the newspapers.
As they neared the center of the arcade, the sounds of shops preparing to open grew more numerous. Shutters, locks, carts, cardboard boxes, and greetings between workers came from different shops and overlapped beneath the arcade.
None of them was a special sound on its own. As one shop after another opened for business, the entire street was moving into a different time.
A woman came out of the prepared-food shop on the right carrying a metal signboard.
She opened the sign’s legs, but one side would not lock into place. As she tried to set it up again, the sign slipped from her hands and one of its metal corners struck the tiles.
A sharp sound shot through the arcade.
Mizuno’s finger moved reflexively to the input dial, but the sound was already over. The level meters had shot upward, the green bars jumping into the yellow and beyond.
The bars had not reached the red indicator at the very top.
The woman from the shop looked around and bowed to no one in particular. A cart that had stopped began moving again, and the sounds of opening preparations returned to the street.
His friend leaned over to look at the recorder in Mizuno’s hands.
“That was loud.”
Mizuno stopped the recording. The waveform on the screen had one tall peak, its tip still within the display frame.
“That’s why I don’t want to turn it up too high.”
“What if you’d turned it up earlier?”
“That part probably would’ve clipped.”
“Even though everything else would be louder?”
“Everything else, yeah.”
Mizuno played the recording back from the beginning and handed one of the earphones to his friend.
The distant truck approached. The coffee shop shutter rose, and the stack of newspapers hit the ground. The workers’ voices disappeared into the ventilation fan, and then the metal sign fell.
It was loud, but it was not distorted.
They could hear the hard strike of the metal corner against the tiles separately from the board’s delayed vibration. Behind it, even the wheels of a cart that had stopped short and the sound of the woman’s shoe taking one step were still there.
His friend removed the earphone.
“You can hear a lot more in this than you could standing there.”
Mizuno saved the audio file. The date and time appeared on the screen.
“I thought it was quiet.”
His friend looked down the street as he spoke.
More people had begun to enter the arcade, and smells drifted from the shops that had opened. Oil was heating in the prepared-food shop, and the smell of coffee came from the coffee shop.
Mizuno put the recorder in his jacket pocket.
During its quieter hours, the street could suddenly make a loud sound. When he began recording, there was no way to know when that sound would come.
Because he did not know, he did not turn everything up from the beginning.
Before switching off the screen, he looked once more at the waveform from a moment ago.
A little space remained above the tall peak.
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