The word sensei in Japanese literally means “one who came before,” but that’s not what Janet Pocorobba’s teacher wanted to be called. She used her first name, Western-style. She wore a velour Beatles cap and leather jacket, and she taught foreigners, in English, the three-stringed shamisen, an instrument that fell out of tune as soon as you started to play it. Vexed by the music and Sensei’s mission to upend an elite musical system, Pocorobba, on the cusp of thirty, gives up her return ticket home to become a lifelong student of her teacher. She is eventually featured in Japan Cosmo as one of the most accomplished gaijin , “outside people,” to play the instrument. Part memoir, part biography of her Sensei, The Fourth String looks back on the initial few years of that apprenticeship, one that Janet’s own female English students advised her was “wife training,” steeped in obedience, loyalty, and duty. Even with her maverick teacher, Janet is challenged by group hierarchies, obscure traditions, and the tricky spaces of silence in Japanese life. Anmoku ryokai , Sensei says to explain: “We have to understand without saying.” By the time Janet finds out this life might not be for her, she is more at home in the music than the Japanese will allow. For anyone who has had a special teacher, or has lost themselves in another world, Janet Pocorobba asks questions about culture, learning, tradition, and self. As Gish Jen has said of The Fourth String , “What does it mean to be taught? To be transformed?”
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Janet Pocorobba. The Fourth String
1 … a companion to order and control …
2 … less notes and rests than irregularities …
3 … an ongoing conversation between the living and the dead …
4 … her tabi looked ecstatically shabby …
5 … found not by fret but intuition …
6 … the context in which it bloomed and fired …
7 … a complete unstringing of the day …
8 … a near primitive instinct took hold of me …
9 … thawed for us in the palms of her hands …
10 … it took an act of violence to be born …
11 … a kind of unhinged moment …
12 … coil, rupture, repair …
13 … finally, he vanished altogether …
14 … cleansed of hesitation, stutters, and confusions …
15 … utterly her own creation …
16 … the great leap out into the world …
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Writers in praise of The Fourth String
“Moving and provocative, The Fourth String charts a profound journey into the heart of another culture. What does it mean to teach and be taught? What does it mean to transform and be transformed? Are teacher and student finally, above all, comrades? This memoir—part biography, part autobiography, part portrait of an alchemy—is as transmuting as its subject, and a joy to read.”
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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.
