味
線
Three strings.
Four centuries.
The instrument at the heart of his work — and the heart of Japan's popular music.
The shamisen is the long-necked, three-stringed lute that has carried Japan's music since the sixteenth century. It travelled from China through Okinawa to the back streets of Edo, where townspeople, kabuki actors and bunraku puppet-masters made it their own.
Its voice is dry and percussive, alive with attack — equally capable of accompanying a single singer in a tea house and driving an entire festival square. For four hundred years the shamisen has been the sound of the Japanese street and the Japanese stage in equal measure.
In Masaki's hands it speaks both: a folk song older than memory in one set, an electric arrangement of a contemporary hit in the next. The instrument is unchanged. The repertoire is everything.
