The Fourth String. Janet Pocorobba
tabi like the ones she was wearing on her feet.
A whiff of aloeswood rose, bitter and sweet. The accumulation of garments was convincing. That she had such power, or a sense of it, drew me closer, and I latched onto the plan easily. If she thought I could, then I could. Saying things out loud, I was learning, was powerful.
“This works?” she asked, holding out a kimono.
I floated over to her and she began to fasten it around me, her tiny hands cinching and fastening. A handful of ties splashed to the floor. Order was not present, nor needed. Something else was at work now. I would learn about Sensei that in her life and her music, there was a companion to order and control, and a time when it should be taken as seriously: intuition.
She held out a split-toed sock. “Try tabi.”
I slid my foot inside the cool white cotton and wiggled my toes. It fit.
2
… less notes and rests than irregularities …
Sensei often said of her music, “We can never know truth.” Was Kurokami written in 1842? 1840? Was the empty space one beat, or two? Hers was an oral art, transferred person-to-person slowly over time, and even when the music was finally written down, in the late nineteenth century, one could never be sure. This didn’t mean Sensei didn’t believe in facts. She just believed knowledge of any kind was better in small doses for the same reason emotions were better kept under wraps: knowledge—like feeling—was powerful, and once acquired, it was impossible to turn back.
Her own facts appeared in fragments at lessons or at the kitchen table—the shadow of a maple leaf on the papered doors of her mother’s den; the hairstyles of old women in the town she grew up in—each detail enlarging or shifting with metaphoric resonance. It may be I who enlarge, shift, diminish. Our art, and our relationship, is written only now, in an effort to pin down, cohere, make a narrative of all the broken bits, seal once and for all, the empty space of ma.
I remember every performance with Sensei, every venue, every stage, even now after twenty years. But how to pinpoint what I learned? It is this that fails me, that lures me into floating in definition. Was it at that first lesson that she told me geisha trained by singing outside in winter to break their voices? That her eldest daughter was a fortune teller? That using the very tip of the finger was best, not the fleshy pad? Her lessons were more like listenings. She seemed less to be teaching me than stirring me round and round, as if distilling me into some ancient wine. The performances were the shape of our days, our years together, but what truly formed us had no time or location or date.
Sensei, if my calculations are right, began her new life teaching foreigners in music at the age of forty-eight. When I met her I think she was fifty-two. She was secretive about her age, like her hair color. If she was forty-eight, it would have been her zodiacal year, the year of the rooster. A preening bird possessive of its hens. It is not an auspicious time. When it is your year, you must be on alert and careful in everything you do or say, so as not to offend the gods.
That year Sensei gave up studying Russian for English.
“Those wars are so passé,” said her eldest daughter, the fortune teller I’d once spied in a green kimono hurrying to the station at dusk. “Probably Shinjuku Station tonight,” Sensei said, nodding.
Sensei began attending English lessons after work at Trendy House, an English school tucked away in a bank of shops near Shibuya Station. By the time I met her, the school was embroiled in scandal. Embezzling, cooked books, illicit affairs. Sensei’s youngest daughter, a graphic designer, would soon produce an acerbic mockumentary about the school called “Let’s Do Talk.” She wanted Sensei to play the role of the class nerd who keeps calling people out on stuff, the sole moral compass in a sea of vice.
I’m not surprised Sensei hated the classes filled with businessmen, office ladies, and housewives. To abide the mundane dialogues, like the ones I taught in class, must have been a kind of torture on her ears. I can see the sullen lips, the slightly rising chin, the dark boil. It’s not that she wasn’t humble. In all the time I knew her, Sensei worked at a hospital sterilizing instruments for surgery, a job perhaps only a step above making tea for executives. I tried to picture her in scrubs and long yellow gloves at a basin of shiny steel scalpels. She kept a long pair of bandage shears in a drawer in the music room, her “revenge” dagger, she joked, for students who didn’t practice. She would never think of leaving her day job. To her, it was security for her life in music.
Soon she engaged a private teacher from Australia, Jacqueline. Through Jacqueline she learned that foreigners wanted to know more about “the real Japan.” They sought out old things they could touch and feel and take home with them. What space opened in Sensei hearing this? What new thoughts? What new way of being amid direct words, broad gestures, laughter, freshness?
Was it plan or coincidence that she had a shamisen with her one day at a lesson? She would have settled it on Jacqueline’s lap at the thirty-degree angle, placed the heavy oak pick in her hand, and showed her the protective strike zone on the cat skin below. She would have called out numbers and corrected her for ma, the little sips of silence between the notes. Showed her how to use hitosashiyubi, “the pointing-at-other-people finger,” sliding it along the strings until the nail split and a small callous began to form on its tip.
Jacqueline came to her house on weekends for lessons. Sensei did not believe in charging money for something that should be about “pure spirit,” so her lessons were free. The day job, giving free lessons to foreigners—this was how she kept herself apart from the traditional world and is part of the complicated legacy from which she comes.
Sensei left her hometown of Toyama City at eighteen and never looked back. Her mother’s family had considerable wealth but lost everything in the fire bombings, which destroyed the whole city. Her mother was a dancer in the Nishikawa guild who, at twenty-three, had met Sensei’s father, a besotted sixteen-year-old who helped with her performances.
“Terrible match,” Sensei said. Her father became a high school principal. Her mother kept dancing.
Sensei was born at the end of the war. Her given name meant “sincerity” and was a man’s name in Japan, but I’ve been told that after Japan’s defeat, in the postwar democracy, under an American constitution, it was a popular name to maintain the old Japanese spirit as the nation entered a new age.
The traditional arts must have felt unfashionable to a young woman growing up in the 1950s. Dance with her mother, an incursion on her own dreams. She went out after school with boys, smoking cigarettes in her kimono. I can imagine the erotic allure of that. She loved Pat Boone, long walks in the mountains, and when she was eighteen, she went to Tokyo to find her own music.
Being from Toyama, a small city on the Sea of Japan, she must have felt like a hick. She stayed with her sister and brother-in-law until her mother could find her a teacher at the Fine Arts University. She was looking for a teacher of nagauta, the “long songs” of her own dances. There was no other choice. One didn’t dabble or explore freely. Music was taught, like long plaits of hair, in direct lineages, passed on in guilds by powerful patriarchs.
I suspect that Sensei already played the shamisen, that her mother taught her so she could play for her dance students. If so, she knew this music, its tempos: less notes and rests than irregularities, like sound and its interruption. Beforeness and afterness.
Finding Kikuoka-sensei changed her world forever and set her apart, as he himself did, and gave her a model for going it alone, for being a maverick. Though their musical lives couldn’t have been more different, inside, I think, it gave her strength, this identification with his spirit.
Kikuoka-sensei was handsome, silver-haired, fatherly, with a big smile. On stage, he sat in the center of the long back row, as unmoving as a potted plant, his skill visible only in his surefooted strumming, and an almost supernatural sense of the singer’s timing beside