A String

The ichigenkin has but a single string and a remarkably simple construction, yet it can produce an infinite variety of tones. Precisely because it has only one string, the player's mind cannot be concealed—when the heart is upright, the sound is true; when the heart is disordered, the sound is disordered. This novel by the Japanese author Tomiko Miyao is based on the real transmission of this ancient art in Tosa (present-day Kochi Prefecture), spanning the late Edo period, Meiji, and Showa eras, centered on two generations of female ichigenkin masters: Miao Ichihashi and Ranko Gakuda. In the late Edo period, five-year-old Miao first hears the wandering painter Kameoka play the ichigenkin in a samurai household and weeps for no apparent reason, forging an unbreakable bond with the instrument. She once admired her own teacher; after her mentor's death she sealed the instrument away in a trousseau chest; after a brief and painful marriage, Miao remarries and, by chance, takes up the old art again, opening a koto school with her husband and accepting many pupils, becoming one of the few to inherit the true transmission of the ichigenkin grand master. Eight-year-old Ranko comes to study, and master and disciple become entangled in emotion and differing in understanding, at once dependent on and rivaling each other, until at last each carries the torch of the ichigenkin in a different direction. The author spent seventeen years and rewrote it five times, writing the oppression of women in the old era and the prejudices of the new era that had not yet faded, and also writing the endurance, obsession, and beauty with which Japanese women place themselves within an art.