THE LAST BIWA SINGER: A Japanese Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance

Abstract

This book concerns the traditions of Japanese blind musicians and ritualists who accompanied themselves on the biwa, as embodied in the music and identity of Yamashika Yoshiyuki (1901-1996). Yamashika was the last person to have earned his income from performing a repertory of musical tales, songs and rites with biwa (a four-stringed lute), and to many seemed like a twentieth-century apparition of the blind bards who first performed the Tale of the Heike and other canonical medieval narratives. Yamashika’s identity as a musician and individual was far more complex, but he became well known as "the last biwa hōshi" and was the subject of books, media programs, and a feature-length documentary film. An apparent living relic of a Japan long vanished, Yamashika even appeared in the New York Times in his last years. The author draws upon approaches from Japanese historical and literature studies, performance studies and ethnomusicology in an examination of history, which yielded on the one hand images of blind singers that still circulate in Japan and on the other a particular tradition of musical story-telling and rites in regional Kyushu, of representations of Yamashika in diverse media, of his experiences training for and making a living as a professional performer and ritualist from the 1920s on, and of the oral compositional process in performances made between 1989 and 1992.