The Fourth String. Janet Pocorobba
him play was vivid. Sensei’s teacher’s playing always made me feel, if not that I could play quite like that, that it was worth doing.
His idea was to build a musical group based on skill and merit and not patronage of musical heads of state. Players would use their own names, be listed in the program as themselves instead of following custom and taking on the patriarch’s last name. The group was called To-on-kai, short for Tokyo Ongaku Kai, the Tokyo Music Society. Every season their small quarterly program, a robin’s egg blue with simple black characters, appeared clipped to Sensei’s calendar.
“You don’t have the heart for this,” Kikuoka-sensei told her one day and advised her to remain an amateur. I wonder if he saw how she darkened at the slights and barbs of competing students, how she complained of unfairness, her hurt and anger. If he saw that and wanted to save her the heartache, and save the music for her, too.
During the difficult years after her divorce, he waived her lesson fees and let her barter for work in the house with his wife, a retired dancer. She stirred the kinton, chewy chestnut sweet, over the stove for days at New Year’s and massaged his wife’s shoulders. She sold tickets to his concerts. When she asked how she could pay him back, he told her, “Teach.”
But here was the interruption. Unable to take his name in the usual way of family clans, nor wanting to enter the professional world she couldn’t bear to join, she was alone with her music.
Her marriage did not define her, nor her daughters, nor her mother. She would go on until she found Jacqueline. After Jacqueline there was Gerry, a Canadian, who left her to learn folk music. Every year, during cherry blossom season, when the petals were lining the streets of Tokyo like pink frosting, Sensei would turn to the window. “Gerry must be near Sendai now,” where the northern cherries were in bloom and there was money to be made busking.
It was Gerry who found the American professor’s papers. Sensei wrote a letter, telling the professor of her idea to teach foreigners. She did not charge because music should be free. She would shame the Japanese, into doing what or how, I never learned.
“Why not teach Japanese?” I asked her that first day. “That way they can pass it on.”
She stared at me as if I were a small child. “Complicated,” she said. “You will see.” Something went dark when she said this, and the atmosphere changed, like we were in one of those snow globes, enclosed in something you can never get out of.
Then she brightened. “Anyway, we should enjoy.” She raised her chin and sipped her tea, folding the edge of her bob at her jawline.
I later found out she’d been born with waves. It was a rainy day and we were in formal attire, heading to a concert, and she was panicking about the weather. She ran back into her rooms and emerged wearing a green silk scarf tied on her head, and when I asked, she admitted that her hair was wavy. She seemed relieved to have caught it in time, to prevent what was natural from coming out, keeping the waves straight and drawn evenly to an icy line at her neck.
3
… an ongoing conversation between the living and the dead …
I once stayed at a Zen temple where it was forbidden at meals to pick up a dish with one hand. The slight adjustment was profound. With no chance for preoccupation with the other hand, no grabbing lightly while lost in thought, I was brought more fully into what I was doing. It made the act devotional, which could perhaps be defined, for lack of better words, as doing something “with both hands.”
In those first days after meeting Sensei I began to live in Japan “with both hands.”
I still sat on the bed in the mornings, sipping my ritual cup of Nescafé while staring out at the waves of Sagami Bay. I walked to school with Larry, up the hill, past the cemetery, to our campus near a tea farm. But now I met the eyes of women on balconies trimming bonsai or hanging laundry, who called out, “Itterasshai!” the ritual leave-taking phrase, “Please go and come back safely,” and answered, “Ittekimasu!” “I will go now and return.”
I started taking my students to dinner in Chinatown, or little pubs where I could pester them about Japanese music. I promised Larry no baseball or bowling outings. We sat at these gatherings, surrounded by a pod of students asking, Did I own a gun? What was my favorite movie?
None had seen a shamisen, but they told me what they knew. The sitting position, on the knees, would be painful. It meant discipline and hard study. And then they offered words like gaman (staying power), and seishin (spirit). They wished me luck. Ganbatte! They were happy I liked Japan. One girl pulled me aside. I will never forget Etsuko, tall and willowy, with slanted eyeteeth and a glamour somehow despite them. She’d once told me her skin was yellow because of a problematic “river.” Etsuko threw her hair over one shoulder and said the traditional arts were wife training. “Japanese wife needs to learn obedience and duty.” Etsuko and the other girls were looking for husbands with the three “highs”: tall, high salary, the high nose of a foreigner.
I wove shamisen into conversations with school personnel and 7-Eleven clerks. “Erai! ” strangers said, akin to “Good girl!” or “Omoshiroi …” a word that meant both “interesting” and “funny.”
I went looking for a book on Japanese music. Not because I didn’t trust Sensei, though the whole situation was so unreal, so unexpected, that I had to wonder. Why would she teach music to foreigners who would soon leave? Were there really no scales, no ways to practice or warm up?
I took a crowded elevator up to the fifth floor of English books at the Kinokuniya store. In the spot on the shelf where the professor’s book on Japanese music would be was a blank. It was out of print, said a salesgirl. I wandered into a nearby department store and followed the signs for musical instruments. Shamisen were displayed on glass shelves under spotlights, their necks long and glossy. A salesgirl showed how it came apart in three pieces and was easy to carry home in a suitcase on an airplane. I shook my head and wandered into stationery, where I bought a black leather techo, appointment book, that fit in the palm of my hand and came wrapped in a box like a Christmas present. In the square for October 16, 1996, I wrote with the attached pen, “Concert in Kamakura” and looked at it from time to time, a place in the sea of blank pages where I was expected to be.
“Performance brings out peoples’ personalities,” Sensei said when she called with updates. I listened, absorbed into her concerns about food, clothing, people, transportation. Who was a vegetarian? How many kimono dressers did we need? And most of all the weather. “Out of my control,” she said mournfully, and spoke of autumn typhoons that could race up the coast and deluge us and our instruments.
Larry was there on the periphery of it all, quiet, easygoing, preparing his lessons and coming in from his reading to the spare bedroom where I’d set up to practice singing. Despite my pleas that I couldn’t sing, Sensei had handed me a cassette tape on my way out the door. Ame no Goro, “Goro’s Rain,” was composed in 1841 and retold the medieval legend of two samurai, the Soga brothers, who avenge their father’s death. In the accompanying translation, I saw a lot of “drenched dew” and “knotweed.”
“Sounds more like a love story,” I said.
Sensei sighed. “It’s always a love story.”
“What’s that noise?” Larry said when he came in. “Sounds like someone’s been stuck by a cattle prod.”
“It’s Goro,” I explained. “These are his last moments before ritual suicide. You’d be sad, too.”
“Oh,” he said and left.
If the sudden and unexpected connection to everything around me felt like a door was opening, it was the return to the music that pulled me inside. I had forgotten what it was like to be in a piece of music, going back and forth over it, honing, polishing. It was like a limb had been missing and resprouted anew.
When Larry left, I laid out the score at my knees. To say that I could not sing the song