The Fourth String. Janet Pocorobba
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The music itself was vexing, with the ma, and the hard-to-find notes, and the discomfort of merely holding the instrument in my lap. But it stirred my desire, which stirred my ambition.
And longing. I recognized the reverberant, sad, solitary sounds immediately as the same ones that followed me through the streets of Odawara. On these tours I felt solitary but not alone. All around me the Japanese people were sorting themselves into patterns and groups. Something unformed inside me rose up alongside them, like when playing piano as a girl the notes on the staff contained the promise of organizing myself into something useful.
To learn, Sensei said, “Narau yori nareru. Do you know this expression?”
I was quite peeved by then. To be struggling in front of her masterful strokes was humiliating. I’d never done anything I couldn’t do well right away. Which is probably why things never lasted long, or could hold my interest.
“Instead of learning, Janet, experience.”
As it neared noon, Sensei asked if I would like to share a “poor meal.” I accepted and followed her into the kitchen. This is how it was: she drifted and I followed. There at the little fold-out table on wheels she explained over bowls of rice and miso soup that the shamisen and voice played in two separate strands that were to never meet. It was the style of the music and it was hard to master. But separate they should stay.
She also laid out the anomaly that the shamisen had become in Japan, stray and unsounded, and in need of hands to play it.
“Do you know how much shamisen lesson cost? 10,000 yen, fifteen minute. How can you learn?”
Along these lines she continued as I perused the little plates she put before me. Rice and bamboo shoots. Miso soup with radish. A plate of pink pickles. I grazed and listened, nodding as she spoke in her unusual English. Unusual not in the way of the phrases I saw on tee shirts and shopping bags: Level up! Or, I want a dream with you! Sensei’s English was unusual in that it said so much with so little, like the shamisen itself: a few notes surrounded by nothing at all.
Brief, clipped, heavily accented, her words always remind me of fat brush strokes on an ink painting with lots of white space around to make them bolder, with the weight of truth. If she was fluent—and I cannot say that she was or was not; as on the shamisen I often wondered, how much did she know?—she was fluent in her own way. She found the words she needed to express what she wanted. And it was something quite urgent. They were the words of a drowning woman, you might say. Words set out like ropes to be taken up by the right people, the ones who understood and had a similar urgent need.
In the kitchen, Sensei put on a checkered smock with keys that jangled in the pocket and contained the sleeves of her kimono. She was as confident here as in the music room. Her kitchen music, I have come to think of it: the whoosh of the refrigerator door; the tick-tick of the gas flame; the kettle that never whistled, only rustled, like wind-blown leaves.
As we ate she shared a brief resume of her life. There was a husband who gambled and drank and stole, to whom she bore two daughters in the same year. Then she threw him out. When the girls were grown, she threw them out, too. “I need my own life,” she said.
It was these asides to the music that made me want to sit back, as if in a darkened theater, and watch.
She got up to cut a pear for dessert, fanning the slices on a gold-edged plate. When not speaking, she looked melancholy, and her brightness faded like the strum of a shamisen: a snap dissolving into sadness.
She returned to the table with the plate of fruit. “I want to expand shamisen music more.” She rolled a hand near her chest, as if drawing something out. “Foreigners love this music. They can learn. They have passion.” She plucked a pink pickle and popped it into her mouth.
How could she be so sure? I wondered. But it intrigued me that she’d thought long and hard about something and become entirely clear on the matter. At the time, there was little I didn’t doubt. I had been asking myself since leaving college—the last of the organized places I would exist, when I had music, too, organized on those staves, the notes in their places—what was I to do now? Ordinary life looked bleak and routine, and so I’d reacted with big international gestures.
“I don’t like Japanese way,” she said. “I think music is about spirit. You are musician. I can tell.”
“Not really, I mean, not professional or anything.”
She nodded and chewed for a moment.
“What is your purpose, Janet?”
She turned her inky eyes to me. They were very soft kind eyes, and this always surprised me within the framework of her severely cut hair. Inky and slick, like river stones.
As I began to reply with all the reasons why I was in Japan, something had already fallen away. I knew by then, as the sun rose overhead and noon passed—I had been there since early morning—by the way she used her words, by her urgency in teaching me the shamisen, by the kimono and the wild improbable cape of her hair, by the photo she took as I fumbled with a shamisen in my lap— “evidence,” she said, though of what I did not know—that this question was not what it seemed.
“I don’t want ordinary life,” she continued. “Watching TV, going out spend money, seeing friend. Genki …? ” she said, imitating the fetching mewl of young Japanese women. “Like your students. I need some purpose.”
“Paaaa-paaaase …, ” she said in her thick accent.
We were in something together now. She, me, and the music.
Things started spilling out of me. I laid them on her table along with the plates of pink pickles, waving my chopsticks over the miso bowl, putting my middle finger onto the second stick as I’d seen her do for an easier grip. I went from bowl to bowl, dish to dish, devouring.
I was from a small town, born of working parents who were not familiar with the arts. The exception to this was an aunt, my mother’s sister, who took me to concerts, plays, and poetry readings. She gifted me with sacks of books at Christmas, and dropped off videos of Maria Callas or an Ibsen play. We never spoke of them. Nor did my parents.
By her front door, my aunt kept a large sea shell, a footed conch, its pink belly facing up. “Hold it to your ear and you can hear the ocean,” she said. Growing up, I would take the hard spiky shell into my hands every time I entered. The mysterious sounds inside the shell excited me and seemed to echo some raw force I felt inside. Like placing my ear to Bach on the cassette player on Sunday mornings after church, I knew these sounds were not outside myself but were a part of me. There was an invisible world within, just at the edge of the visible world.
Sensei nodded knowingly. “Ehh … They can’t understand you.” She listened and I spoke, until her kimono and the salted salmon and the bamboo shoots fell away, and we were two women in a kitchen sharing secrets.
During our meal, Sensei asked, “Would you like to perform with us in three weeks? We need a singer.”
“What do you mean, perform?” I asked.
“Of course. Without performing, no meaning.”
My last performance, in a Junior Miss contest at sixteen, crept into my mind and I tried to push it away. Chopin’s “Minute Waltz,” the repeated refrains and then the bridge, where everything went blank. I’d gone on in the blankness, refusing to stop, striking keys as if knocking on doors to see what was behind them, until one finally opened and the rest of the song tumbled out. Even the trophy they gave me couldn’t erase the humiliation I felt.
Sensei dropped her slippers and slid wordlessly into the empty middle room, filling it quickly with garments she peeled out from long thin drawers in