Читать книгу The Fourth String - Janet Pocorobba - Страница 11

The reason Japanese students are pushed to perform too early, it has struck me, is to experience helplessness and panic. Only then, pinned in fear and shame, is the kata tattooed on the heart.

It is one theory anyway, and it was like this for me. Held in place by the starched silk sash pressing at my ribs and restricting me to only shallow sips of breath, I made sounds on stage that day too soft for anyone to hear. I felt small, swallowed up. But the music was holding me in place, as were the memories of the kabuki cream puffs, the rehearsal at Sensei’s, the practice tape, the sea, and Larry, all infused with the voices and shamisen, darting and diving. I was part of something already.

Hours before settling on my knees on the vermilion carpet, before my calves began their prickly descent into sleep, we were breakfasting at Mister Donut. Sensei wore a handkerchief in her obi as a bib and craned her neck over a bowl of egg drop soup. Savory dumplings and egg rolls were available alongside the glazed donuts and powdery crullers that Denise, Douggie, Lisa, and I ordered.

Sensei had meticulously mapped out our route to the Kamakura Performing Arts Center. She might even have taken the route herself in advance. She was known to do things like this, planning every last thing in her control before going onstage where, everyone knew, you couldn’t predict what would happen.

The morning had brought a low-grade earthquake followed by clear skies and unseasonably high temperatures. Denise was convinced the natural event was a blessing from Goro’s spirit.

“Goro existed when Kamakura was the capital of Japan, in the twelfth century,” she explained on the way to the train.

“Shogun was Yoritomo,” Sensei said. “Very bad guy.”

On the fifteenth floor of the Kamakura Performing Arts Center, we stepped off the elevator into a kind of controlled chaos. Fake spears and wisteria branches were making their way on the shoulders of propsmen to an area behind the curtains, where they’d be taken up by a dancer or stagehand. Girls were carrying trays of tea to green rooms laid with sweet-smelling tatami, and female musicians roosted in circles talking and swapping stories, their hair sprayed into French twists cinched with glamorous combs. Men roamed the halls smoking, shuffling in their slippers, or stood in corners together, nodding and puffing.

“God,” Lisa said, “when Japanese men are attractive, they really are.”

They looked like samurai in their black silk kimono and formal hakama skirts. Black was the color of the day, casting a funereal gloom. “The uniform,” Sensei called the black robe with the family crest, plain but for the hemline on female robes, which were splashed with gold-stitched patterns of cherry, crane, bamboo.

Sensei insisted that “joining” was the point of coming, not singing. Perhaps this is where she thought she could woo me best, in the exclusive backstage arena. It would have been smart of her. The enticements were almost more than I could bear. The patterns, the hair combs, the sounds of musicians tuning their instruments: a cicada-like buzz of the shamisen, the dry tik of an okawa, the watery pom of a tsuzumi, the ringing strike of a taiko. Sensei identified these sounds and more.

At breakfast she’d noticed that I’d rimmed my eyes in kohl.

“You put on make?” she asked.

I nodded, embarrassed, not only for my vanity—someone more self-assured would not need to paint themselves up—but because it seemed to imply that what she was giving me was not enough, I’d needed to add something more.

“Very beautiful,” she said and returned to her soup.

Backstge, Doug went to the men’s dressing area, Denise headed for costumes, and Lisa and I followed Sensei to a gymnasium laid with straw mats on another floor, where we were dressed in borrowed robes. Mine had no pattern, which didn’t matter because I would be on my knees, where any ornamentation would be hidden. It was in fact a funeral robe, which must have confused the woman dressing me since she crossed my lapels right over left, the forbidden pattern reserved only for dressing a corpse. I waved Sensei over and she whispered to the woman, who parted the robe quickly and began again, apologizing profusely.

Sensei looked natural in kimono, and minced along like a girl from the past, as if she were not at all encumbered by the ties or clips at her ribs, the wraparound skirt, the dangling sleeves. She knew how to move in one, in other words, whereas I had to learn to hold sleeves away from door handles. The folds under the sash bunched up because of my hips and needed smoothing. My collar yawned.

This was her world, in other words, a place where she belonged and I did not, even as she drew out a boxwood comb and, drawing it along her oiled strands, said of the women, “Dragon ladies. So fake. This has nothing to do with music.”

Whether it was the kimono or her barbs, I felt raised up, taller, more feminine and more powerful in my robe. I greeted each master she brought me to like approaching the communion wafer at church: eyes trained low, the syllables forming like waves on my tongue.

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu. Please forgive me for any errors I will make today or am making right now.

I bowed, showing them the top of my head. The robe was dictating my movements now, mincing my steps, tucking my elbows. I enjoyed the way the silk fluttered as I walked, the way I could hide things in my obi or sleeves.

It is shocking to me now that she was allowed to go where she went, to glide from foreigners to seasoned masters, from intruders to insiders, and no one said a word. She was allowed, on the surface anyway, to go wherever she needed to go. Was this her intent, too? To show me her power?

She always spoke in English. When we had a spare moment she taught me how to fold a kimono, lining up the seams, and executing a series of folds until it was the size of a shoebox.

Doug reappeared and was making small talk in Japanese when Sensei stopped him. She reached into her obi for a handkerchief and led him to a water fountain, where she dabbed at a driblet of chocolate drying on the collar of his pale blue borrowed silk kimono. Doug apologized profusely.

“I will have to dry clean,” she said as we walked away. “Very expensive.”

That day, Sensei was showing her mastery not just of the music or her mission to teach it the way she believed it should be taught, but of her ability to traverse two worlds: one she hated but was stuck with, and the one she chose and loved.

I saw more and more why Sensei might want to avoid all the complications I was seeing around me, fascinated though I was. Professionals were groomed to embody the forms and pass them on strictly because of birth. Anyone wanting in had to pay, in money and in loyalty, which, with any luck, would end up in adoption into the clan. Everyone else remained an amateur.

It was from amateurs’ wallets that the money flowed, in slim tidy envelopes stuffed with brand new bills no one had touched yet except the clerk at the bank, who ran it through a machine and then fanned it like a hand of cards to count it in front of you. Bills for stagehands, musicians, propsmen, wig makers, makeup artists, and costumers. People bringing extra strings or a heater to toast the skin of the okawa. Ticket takers and food bearers and tea servers. The money went upward, to the iemoto, grandmasters, some of whom were Living National Treasures.

Denise’s fees totaled a few thousand dollars. “Hell, I have no kids. It’s my fortieth birthday present to myself.”

My envelope contained thirty dollars and a handwritten note to the lead singer. Sensei assured me the note should be written in English.

“But can she read it?”

“More honorable,” she said.

Sensei’s envelopes contained no notes. For Japanese, the money was the note. This part of the music world was inshitsu na, Sensei said, one of the “dark humid places” of Japan where things like bribes, bullying, and pornography lurked.

Through it all Sensei walked, hands clasped, like a monk on morning rounds, stepping this way and that, from one world to another, to anywhere she wanted to go. Her white cotton tabi were 21 cm, a child’s size. The toe of one, I noticed, during all the bowing and envelope-passing, was fraying. It was a contrast to the formality of her robe, a mismatch. She was too careful to not know. Why not break out a fresh pair for the occasion?

I have come to see this frayed toe as elemental to her nature. It reminded me of her rooms: worn and fading but buffed and shined daily. Human effort in the face of the inevitable.

The toe of her tabi, in other words, to me, was sheer hope. No matter how worn down, one could still be in the game. It was a refusal to be defeated, a poverty of things, but not of spirit. By the end of the day her tabi looked ecstatically shabby.

At 11 a.m. we left the encampment for the stage. Behind the curtain we assembled ourselves into two tiers, the first for drummers and flute, the second containing an equal number of shamisen and singers. I kneeled at the far end of the singers, at stage right, the seat of lowest rank.

Everyone bowed from their knees one last time, apologizing, pleading, excusing, until, finally, we settled in. Sensei was directly below me on her drum.

The curtain peeled open and wooden blocks slapped furiously at the edge of the stage. The audience applauded. And then silence. And then, as if in code, two taps. Ki! Ki! A shamisen strummed, a slow cranking up of the song that stirred the lead singer to moan, “Saruhodo ni …” “Well, once upon a time …” The voice went up and down, all rumble and ride. The shamisen plucked and fired, and ended on a fading ostinato.

Shan! Denise stomped out in her three-inch clogs, wielding her umbrella, wearing an oversized black kimono with butterflies stitched on its skirts, with red leggings and a purple obi sash that looked like twisted balloon art.

I folded my hands on my lap and kept my eyes low.

Bench, reach, do not search but find.

My lips opened.

Was I singing?

Whose sound was whose?

The music moved fast, like a river, past us all. The shamisen toiled, all slap and buzz and stick, embellishing, adding, building hard. Drums ticked and popped below. Sensei’s drumsticks appeared to splash the patch of deer skin in the center of her drum. A flute started shredding the air. I let them all fill me, like the bittersweet incense on the sleeve of an old geisha singing next to me, the glint of Sensei’s famous hair below.

An infant in Japan is not age zero but one. At birth, the shape is already there, the way known. She does not have to become anything that has not existed already.

I sang so softly I couldn’t be sure I was singing. My goal was to be invisible, to prostrate myself, to surrender completely to the musical past. After, I unfolded my legs gingerly. Ki o tsukete, everyone was murmuring, Easy does it. My knees ached, my ribs hurt.

But I knew, at least now, the shape of what must be filled.

Later, over a bowl of soba noodles near the station, Sensei asked of my performance, “How did you go?” We had left the concert hall even though the music continued. “Fine, I think. It was hard to tell.” I felt slack again in Western clothes. Three weeks, in which had passed a couple of lessons and a kabuki show, in which I hadn’t exactly learned to sing, now unspooled and I was back in my life.

We stood in a knot at the turnstile of Ofuna Station, where housewives with bags of groceries were hurrying home and teenaged girls clutching Tiffany bags were laughing and pointing at shop windows.

A subtle tension in Sensei was now gone. We’d gotten through without major gaffes. Doug’s chocolate mishap could be cleaned. My sudden muteness was forgivable. Lisa missed a few drumbeats but we’d be spared. It had all worked out.

Greatly relieved, we all laughed, a little buzzed relief.

I turned to Sensei. Did one hug Sensei? Before I could decide she slipped through the ticket gates, her raspberry lace kimono coat humped over the obi like a little camel. Something was radiating in her that had not been present before the show, some flush of contentment within. Doug followed, his red nylon shamisen bag like a great oar on his back; Denise, her blond hair twisted into a proud crown; Lisa, blending in with her dark hair and pale skin.

Sensei turned and my heart skipped a beat. Already I had no idea what I would do without her. “Call me next week! I am going to Kyoto in the morning to look for drums.”

They receded and I felt like I did in the entryway, or genkan, of Japanese homes, no longer a part of the interior, but not yet outside, either.