The Fourth String. Janet Pocorobba
at the scanty salad bar, feeling dreamy and expansive in the space between practice and the stage. We had a special relationship, she said. We were “comlets,”
Shooting stars? I thought. OK, sure.
And then I realized, of course, she had misplaced the “r” for “l.”
The word she meant was “comrades.”
At the station, she pointed down a small slope. A small purse looped around her wrist. I couldn’t help but think she was playing dress up, like a small girl in her mother’s closet. And I wouldn’t be exactly wrong. Something from the start about her rang out as grand performance and also absolutely true.
We walked along a busy road with four lanes of traffic roaring by in both directions. Bicycles rang their bells as they careened past. Her wooden shoes rasping the pavement, Sensei clipped along evenly, holding onto the side curtain of her hair in the gusts, squinting up at me, as if from a sandstorm.
Why was I in Japan? What were my plans? Why did I want to learn Japanese music?
This continued a line of inquiry begun on the telephone. She was serious about music, she had said. “We should enjoy.” Already it was attached to a philosophy.
It was hot. Everything was gray, the buildings, the sky, the people in their somber clothes. Only Sensei was colorful, like a butterfly in their midst. Whether it was true or not, as we walked the traffic softened a little, and the drabness of Tokyo was tempered by her friendship, her gentle but insistent presence at my side.
At a lone cherry tree, she turned left into what looked like a motel complex of three-story concrete buildings with long verandas. She had won her rooms in a government lottery, I would learn, after her divorce. I followed the drawl of her clogs up the stairs to the right.
“How often did you practice piano?” she asked as we arrived at door #105. She slid a key from her obi. (“To be a woman is to be always hiding something,” I read once.)
I looked at an empty ramen bowl sitting on a tray outside a neighbor’s door.
“A couple hours a day,” I said. I had always wanted to practice that long.
“Thinking and doing are not same,” she would say later whenever I was dreaming up some big thing I was going to do. Shake her head as to a small child. “Totally different.”
Inside it was dusky and felt like evening. She dropped her shoes and stepped up into the rooms, sighing, as if she’d just lugged a bag of heavy groceries up the stairs. She went around turning on overhead fluorescent lamps that cast a sickly glow. I heard the ticking of a gas flame as I unlaced my shoes and stepped up.
She came to the center of the room and clasped her hands as if to deliver dire news. “Shamisen music is disappearing and Japanese people do not care.”
Small talk did not seem to be part of her vocabulary.
I found her seriousness almost a performance in itself. There was an orchestrated quality about it all, and about her life, too. I didn’t know if she’d be young or old, married or single. I’d imagined, in fact, a blue-haired old lady with a husband snoring in the corner. But as she prepared our tea and moved us to more serious matters—music—she seemed entirely herself.
The apartment was three small rooms and a bathroom sealed off by an accordion door, above which hung, askew on its hook, a framed portrait of the Madonna and Child. The kitchen floor was brown linoleum, the walls, cracking concrete. It was old but clean. Polished, even. A small fold-out table on wheels held a black lacquer bowl that reminded me of her hair. Piled high were rice crackers in silky packages and bags of potato chips.
Instead of assembling at the table, she led us into the rooms, carrying two steaming cups on a tray. The room between the kitchen and music room was empty. The floors were smooth as a stage, and the sun was coming in off the back veranda, which opened onto an overgrown garden and the exhaust fan in the back of the family restaurant next door.
She paused at the threshold of the next room and let out a little puff of air. “My sanctuary.”
The doors between rooms had been removed and so it gave the impression of an approach, a region of delay, empty passage to buried treasure. For every corner and shelf of the room was filled with music. Scores, concert programs, photo albums, cassette tapes, CDs. Higher up were books, including the Edo Encyclopedia she referred to when teaching and photocopied drawings from to line our scores. Along the walls hung several shamisen, their sound boxes covered with silk pouches, some cut from the sleeve of an antique kimono. Tanned faces of drums lined the shelves, bamboo flutes perched in baskets.
I wouldn’t take it all in for years, when I would know what was in all the drawers, where to expect her to reach for a pencil or extra pick.
Two objects lay on the table under cotton towels. She whisked the towels away dramatically. “Say hello to shamisen.”
I was surprised at how unattractive the instrument looked, how odd. The smooth fretless neck was too long. The sound box was too square. Three tuning pegs stood out at the top like careless hairpins.
“Primitive,” Sensei said as I gazed.
“No, no,” I said, not wanting to insult it. Already the instrument had ears.
Why I expected anything, I don’t know. But the usual markers of beauty—symmetry, balance, a kind of smoothness or sameness—were not here. The instrument was not unlike Sensei herself, a beauty less natural than constructed.
She fluttered onto a stool, reached for the instrument by what appeared to be its throat, and settled it onto her lap. It took several attempts to get it where she wanted it. Playing the shamisen, I soon learned, was not about making it come to you. The shamisen was alive in this way, and required all kinds of careful tending. I wouldn’t guess this from looking at it. That day it looked like something easily tamed, a child’s toy. Primitive was exactly the word for it.
Then she began to prepare its fragile tuning, turning in small increments its ivory pegs and striking a string, back and forth, until it satisfied. “Would you like to hear a short piece?” she asked, and it seemed for a moment that it was she who was auditioning for lessons.
She played with her eyes to the floor, her hand moving up and down the neck, the sleeve of her kimono fluttering.
Music filled the room, sad and forceful and leaning, as a kind of breeze, colder here, warmer there, but without firm shape. Her pick slapped the skin, her left fingers pinched the strings, and sliding over the notes came her voice in a kind of pained bleating. She made quiet vocal cues when she wasn’t singing. She seemed less to be playing the instrument than having a conversation with it.
The sounds fell on my arms like a shawl, sometimes enclosing me, sometimes exposing me. But I was enveloped totally the whole time. If I had tried to stand during that two-minute interval, I don’t believe I could have. Something in the music pinned me down, jolted me awake, as if asking me a question.
Then she put a shamisen in my lap and did things that I assumed I should do, too. The more carefully I watched, the more carefully I did them.
On breaks, she brought more tea. How long would I stay in Japan? Were my weekends free? She told me about an American professor, one of few in the world who knew this music. Can you imagine? We can do many things.
I had so many questions—Where did they get the cat skins that covered the sound box? Why was the pick so heavy? Should my nail be splitting like that?—but they seemed childish and jittery in the sober atmosphere of the room, with its charged melancholy music. And I was thrilled to have a future implied, that we would be attached in some way, our destinies thrown together.
Mostly I didn’t want to disturb the feeling that with an instrument in my hands, I felt in control again, no