My name is Rachel Soneschal, I'm the Program and Development Coordinator here at the Library, and I'm so glad to see you all here for Jana's program. I mean, we're very lucky to have Jana in our community, and this is the launch of her new book. So Jana has studied and performed Japanese music in the U.S. in Tokyo for over 20 years. She has been featured in Japanese media and was cited as one of five distinctive foreign women studying traditional arts in Japanese Cosmo. She has been a student of the Shamosan, drums, potato school, and dance. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Writing and Associate Director of the Leslie University Low Residency MFA program in creative writing in Cambridge, Mass. I've been to the poem city a lot lately. The tongue isn't always working. Just making a poem. Her work has been published in the Brumpus, Harvard Review, The Writer, Kyoto Journal, Indiana Review, The Journal, Provincetown Arts, Metropolis, American Athenaeum, and others. She currently lives in Hadamant, Vermont. Please help me love them too. Thank you. Thank you, Rachel, for that introduction. And I'm kind of heartbroken to say that I don't really live in Hadamant anymore. But I live in Callis, and the co-op's kind of in Callis. Greater Hadamant. Yes, right. And wait a minute. It's a state of mind. So I can live there and not live there. It's all right. Good. Good. That's where my heart always is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you all for coming out. Like Rachel said, this is the launch. It's the pre-launch because the book is actually published tomorrow. So you guys are getting it right before it hits the stands. Although it's hit the stands I saw in pair upon last week. So thank you, Rachel, again, for having me and saying, is this working? You're getting some action. And thank you to John for being here for Orca TV and for Sam for coming and selling books. Bear pond, what would we do? Actually, actually close to my heart. All right. My goodness. This is so great. I'm so excited. I have to calm down. One other thing I wanted to say, what I'm going to do is read a little bit from the book. And then, actually, this is the star of the show. Actually, it's not me. This is the Shamisen, this three-stringed instrument. So I thought I would read from my first encounters with it. And you can kind of hear what I thought of it. And then I'm going to play a couple instrumental things so you can hear it. But before I start that, I wanted to just also mention one thing. Today is an important day in Japan. It is the eighth anniversary of what they call 311, which is the tsunami that happened on March 11th, 2011. Yeah, and it's already been eight years. And if you recall, there was this huge earthquake that happened about 40 miles or so off the coast of the northern islands, which set off this huge wave. And it's the biggest, definitely in Japan it was the biggest earthquake that they'd ever had. And I was kind of looking up some facts because I was trying to remember how epic this was. Reading glasses. The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami waves 133 feet. And the earthquake moved the main island of Japan eight feet to the east. And it actually shifted the earth on its axis between four and ten inches. So it was just this huge shock. And then these huge waves came in. The deaths were like 16,000, but obviously like hundreds and hundreds of thousands and millions of buildings destroyed and people homeless and all of that. And the biggest thing also being that the nuclear reactors in the area, remember that? Yeah, yeah. And Fukushima in the Daichi nuclear power plant. So they were having all these meltdowns and problems. So it's, there's a great book that I read. Richard Perry has a great book called Ghosts of the Tsunami, which is fabulous on that whole situation. But anyway, I hope they're doing better. Okay, so I'm going to read from the beginning of the book, but I thought I would just set up the situation. So I went to Japan in 1996. A little harmony. I don't know. Oh, I did this. I did something with my glasses. So I went in 1996 and I guarantee that everybody in this room knows more about Japan than I did when I went. I knew nothing at all. You know, I was in a PhD program. I was like, ah, you know, I don't want to do this. Let me go travel the world. And I ended up in Japan. But the nineties were an interesting time. You know, the bubble, the big economic bubble had kind of collapsed. People were kind of destabilizing a little bit. They were struggling, but internationalization was still a huge buzzword. Everybody was all about, like, using English.  They'd say, I'm going on a date. They'd put American words into Japanese. My students were doing things like getting cosmetic surgery to create double eyelids.  And they were just sort of, you know, experimenting with these other models of beauty, I suppose. But, you know, I knew none of this. I just kind of walked in as an English teacher and was like, okay, you know, I had no idea this was going to stick at all. And the other thing I just wanted to kind of say is that if you, it would be like you going, knowing what you know, which is probably a little or maybe a lot. But take away, thank you, Rick, the internet, take away cell phones and smartphones, GPS, YouTube, selfies, laptops. You know, I had none of that when I went. You know, that stuff was around, but it just wasn't in my world. And I think towards the end of Japan I got a laptop. But like, you know, that is to say, when I went and started studying this and met this teacher who was kind of unusual, you know, I couldn't just go to YouTube and be like, what is this shamisen thing? You know, which I would totally do now. Which right, who doesn't just Google, you know, you can't be curious for two seconds without being like, I got to check Google. You know, so I was really in the dark. I was really in the dark. And that was a good thing. Because had I had YouTube, I would have used it. That is to say, being in a place of extreme not knowing and off kilterness and lostness, I think was a big part of my experience. You know, coming from the west, I already felt like I knew everything, you know, in a way. You know, and I had been very educated and books were everything. I went to learn books. So I probably would have used YouTube and these other things to sort of claim to know. And those probably would have gotten in my way. So this whole journey of learning this instrument was one also of just stripping down and just trying to strip away really everything I thought I knew and every way that I thought I knew. I remember when I met her and got this instrument into my blood. And the first thing I did is I went to the bookstore because like, you know, I was like, I got to get a book on it. That's how I always learn. And you know, the one book was like out of print, you know. I was like, oh, I'm screwed. I got to listen to this lady, you know. And so but it was really just a process of really getting more comfortable with not knowing. And I think the whole journey in this book goes from knowing nothing to knowing nothing, you know. But like at the end, you know, you know nothing, which is a step up on the scale to mastery, right? You start with like unconscious ignorance, you know, you don't know what you don't know.  And then you proceed to your conscious knowledge and all of that. So yeah, that's just what I wanted to say there. Okay. So I'm going to start to read. I'm going to read for maybe 15 minutes or so. Okay. And the epigram for the book is every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition. And that's Florida Scott Maxwell. Part one. I just want to say, too, that the chapters are numbered, but the titles of them are little fragments of language that are lifted out from the chapter itself. So the first chapter, the first little fragment is a companion to order and control. Sensei existed long before me as a child on the foul weathered sea of Japan. Though I have always imagined her sprung whole like Athena from the head of Zeus. I am surrounded by pictures of her at her sink in her old rooms in Tokyo with the pink gas heater to warm her water to wash dishes. Walking alongside the professor under an umbrella in her chic arrow patterned kimono coat. Placing her hand on my shoulder outside the Kabuki Theater, an unexpected claiming. Sitting by a stream in Kyoto in her pinwheel velour Beatles cap next to where a blue heron stands. She took me to her childhood home years later when it was on the verge of being torn down. Out in front of the traditional wooden house was the bench where as a girl she ate her lunchboxes alone to escape the interior gloom. She showed me her mother's rooms which she'd modeled after the Imperial Villa with papered panels and a glossy stage. Her father's small study with his camera lenses. Traveling she called going out together even if we were just going across town.  She saw herself different with me I think. I have always felt not quite natural with sensei yet completely myself. That day walking in an arcade near her house with no music to plan no upcoming concerts. We were talking about our pasts. I was also she said how do you say slut? Did she say what I think she said? I wanted to believe she was as desperate as I was for love had maybe a blizzard of men in her past. I wonder now if she sometimes said only what she thought I needed to hear. But then again isn't that what a good teacher does? There's a little break. Sensei became my teacher if that is what it can be called on a hot day in September 1996. All I remember is that from the start it felt like something was missing. Off kilter. Not quite what it should be. And why wouldn't I feel that? I was new to Japan. I had no history with the place. No desire for it until I was knee deep in debt and needed a way to earn money. English teaching was the answer and what would bring me to her rooms in Tokyo and to the shamisen. Chichichitonten. It was sweet. It was sour. It snapped. It slid. She affixed it on my lap with sticky pads that looked like jar grips. She gave me a pick to travel at strings. She sat across from me and we played its tilting melancholy notes. Wait. Space, she called. My fingernails split. Shouldn't there be another note? Something to complete it? Restore it to balance? No, she said. There was nothing. Only ma. Space. The live blank that existed between sounds. How can I learn? She looked at her hands as if the answer lay there in flesh and bone. You have to steal, she said. It's the only way. Her first lesson. No matter how much I was given, only the things that I took would be mine. I found sensei in the classified ads of an English magazine. Under learning or arts, I can't remember which as she used both, depending which brought more students that week. Free lessons in shamisen and singing. Take something home with you from your stay in Japan. That it was so small and sandwiched between other ads made it no less extraordinary. The most radical word being free. This was usually reserved for old futons or space heaters. In the appearance of the word shamisen, appearing nowhere else in the hip contemporary magazine, was so unusual that it prompted a friend to cut it out and send it to me. She had circled the ad and written on a post-it note. I thought you might want to check this out. So she remembered, I thought, the living room of our dorm at Smith College in the fall of 1985, our freshman year. I was playing the grand piano in the living room, appreciating the fine keys and action. She was sitting on a sofa in wraparound shades, swinging her room keys around the tall neck of a rolling rock beer. On her feet were black canvas high top sneakers, spiking up from her skull a prickly blonde mohawk. By the end of four years she had a bob, an art history major, and a job teaching English in Japan. She'd married a Japanese and now worked in an art gallery. No matter what you see, it's Japanese underneath, she had told me, over tempera on my first outing to Tokyo, where she pointed out that energy drinks contained nicotine and a bottle of something pearly pink in the supermarket was squid poo. But at times she confessed her loneliness, like at a shrine festival that summer, when she gestured to the families in cotton kimono strolling past. This is when you know you'll never fit in. I couldn't imagine making a life in such a stark drab place, such a scrambled city full of ugly buildings, like the school where I worked in Odawara, made of cinder block with its plain classrooms, where I could not even leave a pair of pumps overnight because of the rules. Odawara was known for pickled plums, trick wooden boxes, and fish paste. From the veranda of our apartment you could see its hills ringed and missed. The sparkling sea, the wing of a reconstructed castle roof. On the streets downtown, electricity ran over ground in thick cables trained up like wisteria. The sky was always inflamed like a hot puffy sore. I had come to Odawara with my boyfriend Larry, whom I'd met in graduate school in Chicago a few years before. Larry was southern, soft spoken, shy. In Japan, he refused to bow. It's undemocratic, he said. I wanted to know how deep and to whom. He had trouble folding his long, lanky frame under lintels and tabletops and struggled with his cowboy boots in Genkan entryways. One boy in his class, Tetsu, pointed excitedly to his own steel-tipped toes and said, Dirty Harry. Two hours south and west of Tokyo, Odawara offered little to do aside from work. I planned outings to nearby temples and shrines, but sometimes it was just as fascinating walking to the stationery store or passing the train station where an old woman grilled skewers of meat on a charcoal hibachi and high school girls ringed their calves with glue to get the perfect slouch on their socks. At a gas station, eight men and women in green jumpsuits alighted on the entering car as swiftly and intently as dragonflies to fill its tank, wash its windows, check the tires and refill fluids all in one choreographed sweep, then lined up and bowed as the car swept away. How to explain that these moments of mystery were here before sensei and that they only increased after? Not to be solved, but to be known in all their unknown-ness. Larry was everything I could want in a life partner and this wasn't not on my mind. I was 28 and had given myself until 31 to get married and 33 for my first child, though I had no idea where those numbers came from. We were good friends. He was smart and liked to talk. He was trusting and gentle. These were all good reasons, but on the plane over I was already leaning into the window writing in my journal that I didn't want to be pressured into commitment by a middle-class spinster specter. I envied a girl in overalls sprawled across three seats dozing. I don't know if I ever want to get married, I wrote that first year in Japan. In the corner of our bedroom sat two backpacks filling rapidly with travel guides, maps and paperbacks for a trip to Thailand in December when our teaching contract was up. At night I wrote stories of invented languages, weird occurrences, a haunted apartment and the strangest of all, a vision I had on the eve of leaving for Japan. A woman abroad wearing the high collar and long skirts of Victorian dress sitting at a desk writing letters. She was a friend to the natives and spoke their language perfectly. She defended their cause and used her power to earn them equality and protection and to preserve their endangered culture. I told no one of this vision. It was an Orientalist fantasy, a colonial embarrassment, this portrait of a woman who was utterly and capably alone. The day I met Sensei the mugginess of summer was hanging on. By the time I reached the train in Odawara to take me to Tokyo I was mopping sweat from my upper lip and wishing I hadn't worn a white Oxford. I watched the rice fields as we pulled out of the station and glimpsed Mount Fuji which could appear suddenly like a giant looking over your shoulder. But it was cloudy and only its peak was transparent like a flat white crown in the distance. When I called to respond to her ad Sensei had instructed me in her heavily accented English to transfer to a local train and get off at Setagaya Dai to station, which I did and which had none of the glamour or noise or festivities of even one station away. This Tokyo neighborhood was quiet with a tofu seller and a post office by the turnstiles and an international grocery with coffee samples spicing the air. Sensei stood in the foreground of all this holding the bright green receiver of a pay phone. I had arrived late and she was calling to see if I had forgotten, she told me later. The toes of her wooden clogs were tilted forward whether for height it was very tiny maybe four foot eight or as a way to rest her feet I didn't know. She was in full Japanese gear which I learned which I later learned she dawned for first meetings. They expected kimono didn't they? Very Japanesey she said and laughed. Royal blue silk of a row weave so sheer you could see the white under robe shimmer large a pattern of large flat fans and dolls small well-defined hands a thumb nearly not there and the hair a thousand inky oiled strands combed into a sharp line at her neck. To call it a bob would be frivolous this hair was rigid and composed. I admired its precision its mystery the vanity of it. I am she said and offered me her first name Western style. I used her first name though I have always thought of her as sensei literally the one who came before. The truth is I have never quite been able to find the right word for her presence in my life. Nothing seems to cover the enormity of her placement her importance and all that came then and after. Mentor monk mother she was none and all three. The best word she ever used came one evening at a restaurant where we were having dinner before performance the next day. In the weeks leading up to a show since they never used kitchen knives for fear of finger cuts. We were picking at the scanty salad bar feeling dreamy and expansive in the space between practice and the stage. We had a special relationship she said we were comlets shooting stars I thought OK sure. And then I realized of course she had misplaced the R for the L the word she meant was comrades. I'm going to skip one tiny little. So we walked down the street and now we're just going to read this one scene where we're inside her house her apartment in Tokyo. Inside it was dusky and felt like evening. She dropped her shoes and stepped up into the rooms sighing as if she just lugged a bag of heavy groceries up the stairs. She went around turning on overhead fluorescent lamps that cast a sickly glow. I heard the ticking of a gas flame as I unlaced my shoes and stepped up. She came to the center of the room and clasped her hands as if to deliver dire news. Shamisen music is disappearing and Japanese people do not care. Small talk did not seem to be part of her vocabulary. I found her seriousness almost a performance in itself. There was an orchestrated quality about it all and about her life too. I didn't know if she'd be young or old married or single. I'd imagined in fact a blue haired old lady with a husband snoring in the corner. But as she prepared our tea and moved us to the more serious matters music. She seemed entirely herself. The apartment was three small rooms and a bathroom sealed off by an accordion door. Above which hung a skew on its hook, a framed portrait of the Madonna and Child. The kitchen floor was brown, linoleum, the walls cracked concrete. It was old but clean, polished even.  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 the 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. She paused at the threshold of the next room and let out a little puff of air. My sanctuary. The doors between rooms had been removed and so it gave the impression of an approach, a region of delay, empty passage to buried treasure. For every corner and shelf of the room was filled with music. Scores, concert programs, photo albums, cassette tapes, CDs. Higher up were books including the Edo Encyclopedia she referred to when teaching and photocopied drawings from to line our scores. Along the walls hung several shamisen. Their sound boxes covered with silk pouches, some cut from the sleeve of an antique kimono. Tanned faces of drums lined the shelves, bamboo flutes perched in baskets. I wouldn't take it all in for years when I would know what was in all the drawers, where to expect her to reach for a pencil or extra pick. Two objects lay on the table under cotton towels. She whisked the towels away dramatically. Say hello to shamisen. I was surprised at how unattractive the instrument looked. How odd. The smooth, fretless neck was too long. The sound box was too square. Three tuning pegs stood out at the top like careless hairpins. Primitive, Sensei said as I gazed. No, no, I said, not wanting to insult it. Already the instrument had ears. Why I expected anything, I don't know. But the usual markers of beauty, symmetry, balance, a kind of smoothness or sameness were not here. The instrument was not unlike Sensei herself. A beauty less natural than constructed. She fluttered onto a stool, reached for the instrument by what appeared to be its throat, and settled it onto her lap. It took several attempts to get it where she wanted it. Playing the shamisen I soon learned was not about making it come to you. The shamisen was alive in this way and required all kinds of careful tending. I wouldn't guess this from looking at it. That day it looked like something easily tamed, a child's toy. Primitive was exactly the word for it. Then she began to prepare its fragile tuning, turning in small increments, its ivory pegs, and striking a string back and forth until it satisfied. Would you like to hear a short piece, she asked? And it seemed for a moment that it was she who was auditioning for lessons. She played with her eyes to the floor, her hand moving up and down the neck, the sleeve of her kimono fluttering. Music filled the room, sad and forceful and leaning, as a kind of breeze, colder here, warmer there, but without firm shape. Her pick slapped the skin, her left fingers pinched the strings, and sliding over the notes came her voice in a kind of pain bleeding. She made quiet vocal cues when she wasn't singing. She seemed less to be playing the instrument than having a conversation with it. The sounds fell on my arms like a shawl, sometimes enclosing me, sometimes exposing me. But I was enveloped totally the whole time. If I had tried to stand during that two-minute interval, I don't believe I could have. Something in the music pinned me down, jolted me awake, as if asking me a question. Then she put a shamisen in my lap and did things that I assumed I should do too. The more carefully I watched, the more carefully I did them. On break she brought more tea. How long would I stay in Japan? Were my weekends free? She told me about an American professor, one of the few in the world who knew this music. Can you imagine? We can do many things. I had so many questions. Where did they get the cat skins that covered the sound box? Why was the pick so heavy? Should my nail be splitting like that? But they seemed childish and jittery in the sober atmosphere of the room with its charred melancholy music. And I was thrilled to have a future implied that we would be attached in some way, our destinies, thrown together. Mostly, I didn't want to disturb the feeling that with an instrument in my hands I felt in control again, no longer without eam. There was hope. So I am going to approach the shamisen. Take off all my jewelry. Upstream in a boat probably to the pleasure quarters. But this music that I played was from the theater. So there's a lot of, you know, making sounds that are insects or, you know, to indicate summer or seasonal sounds or things like that. There are three tunings in this instrument. This is the main one. It's called non-shoshi. And this is a little song. It's like an interlude because the songs that I learned were like 45 minutes long and they were just like killers. So this was this one little piece and it's a very famous piece and it's about a woman who turns into a snake ghost.  So she turns into a snake ghost and I don't know if she kills him or what she does. But this is an interlude that's really just talking about blossoms. The plum blossoms and the cherry blossoms. We're between those right now. The plums just finished in Japan or in Tokyo anyway. And then the cherries are coming when... Did you see any of them? No, but I know they're coming now. They're coming probably now right now. It's so brief, right? A few days and then they're going... I love it when they fall, like when you see all the cherry blossoms on the ground and they're just like lining the streets like pink frosting. I mean, it's just like these tons of them and they're just beautiful. A good first snake. A good first snake. From this song, which is called Suihiro Gari, meaning the fool and his fan, is a beginner piece. Now, if you've studied a musical instrument and you get warm-up practices and things like that, they don't have that. I was like, where's the hand in virtuoso? Things that I can practice. She's like, no, you play the whole song. I'm like, what do you mean? Can't we just stop and practice it? And you really had to play the whole song and be with her in the whole song. And it was excruciating because you'd be making all these mistakes and it was so loud and obvious and it was just like... But this song is very celebratory and anytime you go to a recital, well, not anytime, pretty often, it's the first song. Because it ends with sort of long life to the Emperor, which has nothing to do with this fool who goes to market and can't even buy a fan. But it's an excuse at the end to just celebrate the Emperor. So it's very celebratory. But it's the beginning piece and it's eight minutes long in totality and I said, well, why is this a beginner piece then? It's pretty long and it's not easy. And she said, there's no tuning change. So as you're noticing, this instrument comes out of tune extremely quickly and part of the mastering of it is being able to, in the music, know where you have time to go and check the tuning. There's nothing like a guitar that holds the strings. You know, I used to be like, well, why didn't they fix that? You know, why just keep it that way? Like, come on. And there's actually some... There's different sizes of Chami Sanz and there's one that's quite big and it's used with rock and roll, western music. And so they, I heard, I saw this once, they fixed all the strings and tuning so it doesn't come out of tuning. Which, you know, when you're playing with western instruments, which I did once with a violinist, she wrote a sonata for Chami Sanz and Violin and we recorded it together and it was miserable because I kept coming out of tune and she was fine, you know.  I also heard, I don't know if it's true or not, but that before western instruments came into Japan, it was more acceptable for the Chami Sanz to be out of tune. It didn't need to have that. No, I don't know if it's true or not. But it's an incredibly precise instrument. It really requires a lot, a lot of playing. Swahiro Gardi many times, many times. So here's this little formal, little excerpt from this song. Let me just make sure I'm not environmentally friendly. So often this is ivory. Some Chami Sanz and some ways of playing, they use Beko, which is tortoise shell, which is great, it's very soft edge and everything, but there was an inventor that we knew in Tokyo and he was trying to create Chami Sanz that had materials that were not endangered. And so he, this is ivory rub, so it has the exact weight and feel of ivory, but it's plastic. And he also, when he's made plastic Chami Sanz, this I think is dog skin, which is a little bit cheaper than cat skin is kind of top of the line. And the strings are braided silk. So those are just okay. But because silk is pretty expensive and you're practicing, practicing breaking strings, you know, we play with like a nylon third string to just kind of have some durability, but it doesn't sound the same. It's too like snappish. Like if you have, this is a silk one, I think it's a little softer. And then as you can tell, this pick is really sharp and it's weighted. So it's like a little bit of a lever in your hand. But under the skin, under the strings, there's a little patch of skin to protect the skin. So you're supposed to be striking in a percussive way. And my teacher said in the beginning, it's like, she's like, it's like piano. I was like, what? She's like half string, half drum. You know, hammer. Okay. So you really are slapping. What are you saying here? This thing? Yeah, what's that? Okay, so this is an embroider just ornamental piece that we use so that our arm will stick. This is such a slippery instrument. So you really are trying to sandwich it down between this little pad and this. Underneath it would be slippery. So here you want to stick.  So I can slide. Right? So over here you want to slide, here you don't want to slide. So it's kind of interesting. And I forgot this once on stage.  It was so sticky and I was sweating.   I was panicking. But I got through it. How long were you over there and how long were you studying with that woman? Yeah, so I was there for about five years. And then, but once I came back, I wasn't happy. I wanted to keep going back. So I just would go back every year. And to see my teacher and to play with her and perform. We didn't do Skype lessons or anything like that. She was like, no, if you want to play, come here and see me. And she would say things like, well, if we didn't have music, there'd be no reason for you to come back to Tokyo. And I never knew how to take this. I was always like, you know, because I wanted to be independent. I'm American, you know, but that's not what it's about.  You kind of belong to them. And so I would kind of chafe against that. I'd be like, I'm my own woman, you know, but I really wasn't. I couldn't do anything without her. But once you said that too, I would say, well, no, I would come back to see you. I care about you. She would say, no, you wouldn't, you know. And I would always get blown away by that. And I never understood it. I was like, oh, until maybe a few years ago, I think I finally understood that we exist in music. Like that's our relationship. And it's more than that. But everything we do, we communicate in this way. Everything we say to each other, I think, is through music. So I don't know if that sounds cryptic. I don't mean it to. But I did have that kind of moment of clarity. Have you found the community of people here in the US or a person here you play with? Or is it really? Great question. Yeah. So this instrument, the way I played it, this Kabuki music and stuff, requires a lot of people. So I went through a whole period feeling kind of resentful. But after my time, I was like, OK, you've taught me something. I can never play on my own. Thanks. But again, the interdependence of Japan. But really, I came back. And for many years, I was so sad. And I lost my whole community. And so I would teach it. I would play with my tapes and really just struggling to keep it alive. And then finally, I did kind of make a break for it. And I kind of created like a little, oh, Jennifer Zollner. She saw my, and Karen, I made this performance, a little show called Seventeen Views of a Shamisen, which I would play, but I would also re-creative stories. I would try to make it work in ways that I could. But no, no. You weren't beautifully in that way with the Seventeen Views stories. Good question. I would say it's orchestral music, right? So it could be up to 18. You want to have three Shamisen's, three singers, like equal numbers. And they play on these long red cloths. And then in the front row, you have drummers. So you have usually one stick drum, one lap drum, a couple hand drums, and then a flute player. So there's so many people, and as you can imagine, all interconnected. And the one thing I find really fascinating, the leader of the orchestra. There's no conductor, right, like here. So the leader is the lead Shamisen player. So you heard those little noises I was making, right? Those are the cues. And they play all by memory. And they play just looking straight ahead like this. And so they're not looking at each other. So it's all ear. So they are so attuned to each other. Ear and waiting for those cues, their tempo and signals to come in. The singer and Shamisen are very, they have to be really connected, you know? And they say that one thing you really need to play Shamisen well is empathy. Very strong ability to connect with where someone else is, you know? And because everyone's practicing this the same way too. It's all patterns and memorizing. Which also is difficult when you come back. I want to rock and roll with this. I'm like, I can't. I don't know anything with these patterns. So yeah, it's a really interesting journey. So do you tend to play with the same people and rehearse with them? Is that a thing where you could move in and play with, like when you say everybody's playing together? Can you just, do you need to really know each other well and have a person with each other? Or can you just jamming with each other? Great question. Oh my God, no. No jamming allowed. Don't even think about it. That's why my teacher, and if you read the book you'll see, she kind of battled the system which was very archaic and feudal, which really had like a patriarch at the top and it was about money and status elite. And the traditional way it's taught is in these guild systems, which I do have to say I'm grateful for because I got to learn it. It's still alive. But it keeps the music very controlled by few masters.  So my teacher said, well forget that. Music is about your spirit and it's about, let's jam. So we did, but in the professional world, so two things, you would rehearse one time before a show, only once. And it was called a tsubo oase, which is a meeting of the joints. Tsubo or the pressure points I think in shiatsu massage. Because everyone is practicing the same music. You can't change anything. If you want to change something you got to start a new school. It's so rigid.  And then they might not know each other that well. And as I played with a lot of professional people, I had to pay and they made us look good. But yeah, you didn't really know them. You didn't have to know them. It was very dutiful. It would show up and take a lot of money to play with you. I'm like, great, thanks. Whereas my teacher, she taught foreigners because she thought, she said, you have passion. And she had passion. And she was very unusual in this way. And she got a lot of grief, as you can imagine too. But she had her own little mysteries and paradoxes.  I was like, why don't you teach some Japanese people so that they can break down their system like revolution, let's do it. She was like, no, I don't want to play with them. She wanted to play with us. So there were just little paradoxes where, yeah, she was very Japanese in the end. Liz, Benjamin. So when you're playing with a group of other players, is everyone playing the same tune? Is it unison or do you have different parts? Good question. There's different parts. And let me say this. Not unison. There's no unison and there's no harmony. So there's no playing really together. And my teacher, you'll read about it, she describes this with Shamisen in voice. She's like, I don't know if you noticed. I'm not a real singer, but they don't meet ever. So you're always just like behind or in front. So that's their sense of movement, I think, in harmony, is being strands, almost like plates and hair that they're kind of weaving together, but you don't really do it together. So you'll have singers and Shamisen who are this incredibly complex kind of chasing, she would say flirting, like flirting. Everything was a seduction with her. So you had these drummers would come in which were from a completely different art kind of music. And they'd be doing each other kind of crazy things to give a sense of momentum, but it was very, very different. And I say in the beginning when I'm trying to learn, I'm like, it's like I didn't have the right ears to hear. I could not pin the notes down. And her voice, I was like, what's that? Is that an E? I would try to make a staff. And I was like, I just can't do this. I don't know what is happening, but the vocal style is so, it's barely landing. It's almost just like, you know. Is there a parallel between the difference in music and the difference in language? Completely, right? Yeah, so different. I was lost on two planes. And yeah. Has she read the book? She did. When it was taken for publication, I freaked out. And then I was like, okay. And I knew I had to have her read it or at least read it to her or something because she's not really at the English level or she's going to read all of this on her own. So we gave it to her son-in-law. He married to an American. They live in New York. So we gave it to John. He read it. He had a couple of things. And then I went to Tokyo and sat with her for a couple weeks. And I just read her. The parts that her son-in-law had sort of thought were maybe not something that she wanted shared. I mean, it was her decision to be called Sensei and not use her name. When I was writing, I always used her name. As a matter of fact, I'm really paranoid that I'm going to mention her name during one of these readings because I, you know, but and she never wanted to be called Sensei. She's like, I'm not a Sensei. That would mean I'm formal like these Japan people. Japan people. You know, she just wanted to be herself. For her, that was freedom, you know. But, yeah. So when you read her the book, the excerpts, did you read it in Japanese? No, no. I read it in English. And then, like, there's one, it was surprising some of the things she objected to. Like, there's this episode where I talk about suicide, which is not an uncommon topic in Japan. And I was talking about this beautiful lacquer chest that she bought herself once when she was feeling very suicidal. I mean, she went to Kyoto and got this gorgeous thing. And I was commenting about, wow, I was so impressed that she had, she could organize herself into doing that. Like, just when you feel so low, because I was like, who hasn't felt like, you know. And so in the book, I said, you know, something about being depressed. And she was like, oh, take that out. So she didn't mind suicide being in there, but like depression. Wow, that's fascinating. Which I thought maybe is just, you know, the mental illness thing. I don't know. But she didn't want it to be depression. So I just said, oh, I didn't know her mood, or as I said, something about her mood. And then there were other things where, like, she would be very funny about the, you know, a lot of people who play this music are rich, you know, rich, because they can afford it. And sometimes it's housewives. She had a thing against rich housewives. She was divorced. I mean, she was quite a rebel because she just, not an easy life to be divorced and raising two children alone in Japan in the 70s. But so, you know, she would call these women like dragon ladies. And I would say, well, should I take that out? You know, and she was like, no, leave it in. So, you know, I tried to give her every chance to do, you know. And there was a part two where she was worried about looking angry. She was angry at something. And I said, well, of course you're angry at this. Anyone would be, you know, but she didn't want to, it was losing control. She didn't want to be seen losing control on the page. And it took several of us to kind of convince her that she didn't look that way, the way she thought she looked, like a snake ghost lady or something, you know, she was very dramatic. But she is probably in her mid-70s now. Is this being translated into Japanese? I mean, not right now. I was told that, you know, I don't know how that happens. Either somebody takes it on. Oh, my gosh. Someone has to want to translate. That's how these things happen, I think. I mean, if it was a big book, someone would be like, yeah, let's translate it. But it will probably be somebody who just reads it and loves her. Like everybody who's read this story, it's her. It's about her. And I made it sort of a double portrait, you know. So it's just as much about her as me. I mean, I'm in there as sort of this flailing foreigner trying to understand.  So it had to be two, which is a little different from the western model of the hero's journey, you know. I couldn't do that. I was like, no, she's like, that's how we relate it. That's the story, you know. And so a lot of publishers were like, well, I don't know. And then they'd be like, well, we want not more of you like on the page. Can you be more confessional? And like, they wanted all this stuff. I was like, no. This is about Japan. You know, it had to have a kind of, you know, I wanted to have a kind of elegance and a Japanese quality to the voice and more hinting, you know, than just saying, yeah, you know. So hopefully there's, you probably could hear it. There's a lot of, like, there's a lot of doubt. I don't know. I'm just trying to kind of put together the, putting our story together. I think I was really trying to understand who she was, who she was to me, who she is to me. And you still go back. I do. I do. I had a little break from like 2007 to 2011. I was actually there. I had just performed when I had just come back before the tsunami, like a week before. And then I had another little break until like 2015 or something. So it's less.  It was really, you know, and I was still writing. So I was still like in it, which is probably why I couldn't finish the book. So it's still, it's still with me, but, you know, it's one of those things. I don't know. And I'm sure you've had this experience with other things, but you know, like you want to put things in a category.  We have this notion of closure. Isn't there closure? Like, can't this just be over? Do I have to keep loving you?  I don't think there is. And I think there's something about this whole relationship with her and with the music in which there's no assumption of closure, you know? I didn't know, you know, that I was never going to forget about her. You know, I thought I could just have a couple lessons and like leave, but it just is that way. And so I think a lot of the times, and I say this in the book, the book is very frank about the whole psychological journey. I mean, there are times where I was just like, I just wanted to like get rid of everything. Like, it was just too painful. I didn't want to look at it anymore, because I can't have it. I can't be there. I can't be studying. I mean, it just was so impossible. So how do you live with that? You just do. If you love it, you try to do it when you can. Nothing's perfect. But it's just one of those things.  And as teachers do, right? I mean, we've all had a special teacher who's just kind of struck us and we've connected with them and they've kind of stayed with us. It's just much more overt in Japan and there are all these assumptions of, you know, like I couldn't change teachers. Like I could never have like done that. And as a matter of fact, at one point I wanted to study, like there's another Shamisen, it's that bigger one, the big rock and roll one. And they play for the puppet theater and it's a really wild, crazy music. And I wanted to study and I was like, I want to be wild. And she was like, no. And I was like, what do you mean no? And it's just like, you can't, you do this. You already do this. You can't go do that. You'd have to give it up. I was like, what? Like I just could not understand this. But I was like, okay. Okay. I'm going to be loyal. But those were challenging things. And I don't even know if I made the right decisions all the time. But it's just like, okay, I'll go with that. But you know, that I'd be kind of mad about it or something for a little while.  And she would help me accept that. She knew it was hard for me being from where I was from. She tried to make it okay. But yeah. It's challenging. Judd, from the little you read, you really gave beautiful pictures for us.  And the way you described that really came alive. Thank you. I'm so glad to hear that. I'm glad to share that. Thank you.   Like this is so ugly. It's cinder block. Like it's like what? And then you'll see like one plum tree on the corner. And it took a while to be there to really see that tree, right? It really did. And then I started to realize, oh, it's, it's the viewer. It's who you, what you're seeing, you know? Yes. I don't know. Yeah. How many, you said she taught only foreigners. So how many students would she have at one time? Um, it would, it would vary, you know, with the sort of influx of foreigners.  So like her teaching has taken a dive. But, you know, when I was there, sort of, she calls it our golden time together. There were, there were, there were lots of us. There might have been like 10 really devoted people with a core of like four or five who are really good and could, could hold a show together. Um, and so she would have, everybody was very devoted.  Because, you know, I thought I'm going to go and have all my, my lessons, like just me. But like soon after I started, I'd show up. There'd be other people there. I'd be like, well, what's this about? You know, and she would overlap us and kind of have us play together and all this stuff. And I used to, and she used to say like, you know, if they hear you, they will get stronger.  And I was like, what, I want my own lessons. So I would have to help.  And that was tough sometimes. I was like, no, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. You were working at this time. Yes. How much did you practice? Working, meaning a day job and all that, yeah. You had other things to do. Not a lot. I basically taught English, right, all day.  I lived very close to her. There's a tradition in Japan of, it's called an uchidashi. It's like the live in disciple. And I didn't live with her, but almost. So we lived kind of daily life almost together. So I would come home, get my instrument, usually go to her place, and there'd be lessons for the night. There might be somebody to meet. There might be something, a meal. She always fed me. And it was just, the thing about learning in Japan, I think, is like you're living side by side with the master.  I wanted to just like have my lesson and go. And you just don't. So I would find myself kind of, suddenly you're just in the thick of a lot of relationships, whether you like it or not. And you've got to sort of navigate in a way. But I just, that was kind of my world. I did study like the language a little bit. I studied. I had a boyfriend at one point. He's in here. Larry or something else? No, not Larry. I sent Larry home. I chose my teacher and I was like, yeah, you go home. I'm going to stay. So I had this relationship. But I really was pretty devoted to it, which it felt really great if I didn't think about it too much. But then like once in a while those days, I'd be like, what is this adding up to? And like, what am I going to do with this? You know, all those questions we have. It's got to add a bottom line, bottom line, that thinking would come. And I'd be like, oh my, I've come so far. Oh my God, like am I a fool? Like I would have these sort of dialogues with my, am I a fool for doing this? Or am I really smart? Is this developing my character? Like I didn't know. That's what I'm telling you. I didn't know. I still don't know. It's just like, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody would like to see the instrument, please?