The Fourth String. Janet Pocorobba
focused on the notes rather than the spaces between. And the notes didn’t seem to be notes. Not like notes I knew, that sat on a staff and didn’t move, that had a value and a shape, a place, up or down, high or low, sharp or flat.
All I can say is that the notes of the Japanese voices on my tape seemed to contain all these qualities at once. As soon as they began, they seemed to move, away from their origin and toward their destination but in no straight line I could hear. They seemed to ascend while descending, stop while continuing. I can think of no other way to put it, only to say that it was very complicated. And seemed completely possible until I tried to do it.
I rewound, listened again. I broke a page down into a line, a measure, a beat, a breath, straining to distinguish the most imperceptible differences. Soon exhausted, I would give up and roll off my knees.
And yet the tune was infectious. It followed me everywhere. On my steps up the hill to school, making tea in my room. If I’d been listening and then gone out walking, I heard the notes in the sound of a shoe on the stairs, a murmur in a shop, the trickle of water, a bird’s cry. The result of my utter failure to produce the note, I see now, was the beginning of listening intensely.
Sensei told me not to worry.
“But I don’t know where the music’s going. It seems to just do what it wants.” I wrote a Western staff in an attempt to place the notes. But even with that, using the only language I could use to describe what I was hearing, I failed. It was like I had the wrong ears to hear it.
And the overall quality of the voices and singing style was impossible to render. Where Western voices sail clear to high C, and treasure clarity and polish, all I can say is these voices sounded broken, tortured, as they revved in the throat and bleated like a raw wind over the sea.
Each time Sensei called with updates on concert preparations, I expected her to reveal some key piece of information that would unlock the technique, but none came. I hoped to learn more when I returned to her rooms the next Saturday for another lesson.
It was only a week later, but autumn had arrived. The skies were clear and the air freed from summer’s clutches. I followed the route she had shown me, down the busy road, Kannana-dori, which I named that day “Lucky Seven,” passing the barber shop and the car dealership, where Ichiro in his Giants uniform was still smiling on a flag. At the cherry tree at the entrance of her housing complex, I turned in and headed up the three stairs and down the concrete veranda.
Outside the steel door to #105, I heard two shamisen snapping crisply. The door rattled when I knocked.
“Hai, dozo!” Sensei yelled, not stopping her teaching.
“You have to wait,” she said to the tall foreign woman on the stool as I slipped off my loafers and stepped up into the kitchen.
“Space!”
The woman was Denise, a six-foot bashful blonde from Georgia. You’d never know she was about to dance as Goro in the show. She chose male dances instead of female, because of her height, but I suspect she preferred flashing muscle and downing cups of sake to permissive mincing and gazing at the moon.
“I’m a bull in a China shop around here,” she sighed.
Her dance school was the same as Sensei’s mother.
“All connected,” Sensei beamed.
“She’s a national treasure,” Denise told me later. She only came to learn shamisen to be around her.
Soon arriving were Lisa, an exchange student at Waseda, and a tall man Sensei called Douggie, who handed her a box of Hershey’s ice cream pops that she tucked into the freezer. Most of her students were Americans.
Over tea and rice crackers, they talked about another student, The Enchanting Creature, who apparently had gone missing. Then it was time to rehearse.
In the music room, Sensei, Doug, Lisa, and I kneeled on a line of cushions, while Denise struck a pose in the empty middle room. Sensei cued a tape and the music began, somber, rigidly organized, and baffling. Next to me Doug plucked a shamisen. Lisa tapped a hand drum next to Sensei, who was playing a small round drum with two long sticks. It was hard to hear the taped music over all the instruments and Denise stomping under her umbrella. My urge to understand pressed on me. I blurted out notes, trying not to sing in the blank spaces.
At the end of the song, Sensei kneeled beside me. “You can sing kind of quietly, how do you say, lip synch, it’s OK. Most important is to look professional.”
As in the shamisen lesson, my concern was with the note. That is what would either embarrass me or not. It was the one thing I had control over, I thought. But it was what fell around the note that was important, like the form of the singer as she sat and fulfilled her role. This was about not embarrassing others.
A form, or kata, is a precise exercise, a foundational stroke. “Kata is a boundary or skin,” my journals say, “where the individual heart meets collective experience.” Kata are what allow a beginner to go onstage, to join the flow, providing safe harbor in unknown seas. The kata sets you up for a lifetime of artistic practice. A kata was reliable.
While the others took a tea break and stretched their legs, Sensei demonstrated.
I took some issue at first with being shown how to sit and turn a page. But it soon became clear. I was moving too much: bending, reaching, turning. I had to do one thing after another. Linear, slow, literal.
When it came time to sing, I was to pick up a tiny fan Sensei set by my knees. The fan was never to be opened. I should find it with my fingers not my eyes, and when contacting the smooth bamboo rib under my thumb, draw it gently up into my lap where my left palm should lay open to receive it.
We tried again and the music unspooled like a heavy wave, rising and falling around us. Reach but not move. Find but not look.
This was the beginning of the great funneling, the whittling of impulses into a first form. Here, without the basic vocal training or ability to even follow or hear exactly where the notes were going, I was pruning and taming the body into a recognizable shape in the world. A kata was doable, even if the music was not. It hallowed my actions, giving something trivial great weight and importance.
Getting inside things without words. Infection without understanding.
I have often wondered why Sensei invited me to perform when I knew so little. Did she see a talented person who might be useful to her mission? Or a girl full of desire who needed a form to realize those desires in the world?
Embodying a kata meant being recognizable in her world, and in Japan. With effort and time, you could polish, along with the actions, your true intention.
“How much do we know reality?” she said one day years later at a diner in Vermont where she’d come to visit. Among the plates of lasagna, scalloped potatoes, and apple pie, she said, “This is reality, but in a way, just food. We are anxious every day. What is normal way? We are looking, but it doesn’t exist. That’s why, curiosity and desire are a necessity.”
Instead of duty, she meant. If one is to find one’s own true path, one has to bear desire. Be able to contain the dream.
After rehearsal we were whisked off to the theater. Sensei had ordered us tickets for a one-curtain show. The woman had plans. This was not meant to be entertainment but benkyo, study. Kabuki theater was the historical genesis of Sensei’s music.
The dance was Musume Dojoji, “The Maiden at Dojo Temple,” Sensei explained on the train, leaning over her tote bag brimming with music scores and snacks, hands clasped, as if delivering a lecture or blessing.
A woman has fallen in love with a priest. When he spurns her, she comes to his temple, pretending to be collecting subscriptions, and traps him under the temple bell and turns into a snake ghost. “Women are demons,” Sensei said, wiggling two index fingers