The Last Biwa Singer: A Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Last Biwa Singer: A Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance Mathew W. Thompson The Last Biwa Singer: A Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance. By Hugh de Ferranti. East Asian Program, Cornell University, 2009. 336 pages. Hardcover $56.00. In the early 1970s there emerged significant academic, media, and public interest in a handful of Kyushu residents who were described as living relics, all that remained of an ancient tradition of biwa (lute) performance that could be traced back to the violence of the twelfth century that ushered in Japan's medieval period. Yamashika Yoshiyuki (1901-1996), the subject of this volume, garnered the most attention and, for reasons concerning the breadth of his repertoire and the uninterrupted nature of his career, eventually became widely known as "the last biwa-hōshi" the last of the blind lute players known for their performances of Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike) and their ritualistic placation of the angry ghosts of dead warriors. The title, The Last Biwa Singer, is of course a deliberate reference to labels of this kind, but it is not intended as a statement of fact. It is rather "a characterisation to be understood in light of the array of representations of Yamashika" (p. 13) that emerged in scholarly journals, television, movies, and print after his "discovery." As such, this volume is not a study of Yamashika's life (there are many of these in Japanese) or a formal analysis of the techniques [End Page 439] of his performance. It is an examination of the practices and images from history, folklore, literature, musicology, and popular culture that were brought to bear in order to document, categorize, and construct the identity of both Yamashika and his profession. In particular, author Hugh de Ferranti is concerned with "the appropriateness of characterising a performance tradition through examination of the practice of a prominent individual" (p. 4), an approach that is particularly susceptible to the varied "processes through which ideas of culture and tradition can be 'created' by researchers" (p. 5). The image of Yamashika that emerges from this discussion is a fascinating portrait not of a man but of an idea, a character within our own imaginations. In the end it is hard for the reader not to feel a little sympathy toward this elderly musician who found himself appropriated by so many different narratives. For literature scholars he was the last inheritor of medieval traditions of storytelling; for musicologists he was an often-frustrating test subject for theories of oral performance; for the media he was a living anachronism that could be packaged and sold as a spectacle; and for the urban public he seemed a natural target for the pursuit of pastoral nostalgia. The author, too, does not hesitate in expressing regret over the "inequality of power between Yamashika and all of his interlocutors" (p. 161). One of this volume's greatest strengths, however, is that the author does not allow it to become bogged down in a critique of that inequality. His goal is one of documentation, not judgment. The study is organized to resemble an inward movement through the layers of cultural texts that came to surround Yamashika, toward the records of his words and actions that have been compiled by others—or what Ferranti refers to as the "metaphoric core" of his representations, a term that is repeated throughout the book (see below). Chapter 1, "Images and Histories," provides a general survey of scholarship concerning biwa hōshi and mōsō (blind ritualists that use biwa in performances) and their traditions of storytelling in medieval and early modern Japan, and of the popular images of these icons of the past that emerged in the twentieth century. This exploration of various subjects ranging from blindness and gender to scholarly disagreements concerning guild repertoires and institutional practices is structured by the premise that "if not for the framing concepts of the biwa hōshi and their significance for the development of canonical performed narrative genres, it is doubtful that knowledge of Yamashika would have extended beyond Kumamoto and Kyushu folklorists and historians" (p. 19). The consequences of this confluence of pre-modern...