ABSTRACT
One afternoon in February of 1998, I got a phone call from Fumiko, a nagauta singer and Geidai graduate I had recently met who had invited me to an upcoming concert in which she would be performing hauta (short songs associated with geisha), a lyrical style of shamisen music closely related to nagauta. I was really looking forward to seeing her concert, not only for the chance to hear hauta, but also because she was one of the few amateur performers I knew who was not affiliated with Tōonkai and followed the way of an iemoto-like musical family. I had been expecting to receive a copy of the concert flier on Akiko’s home fax machine as I lived without such common everyday items during my stay in Japan. Fumiko had called to apologize for not having sent the fax and hoped that I could still attend her performance. She had decided not to send the fax because she was uncomfortable about Akiko knowing about this concert. I had not realized it at the time, but Fumiko was good friends with one of Kikuoka’s young uchideshi and she explained to me that this student would also be singing in this concert and was afraid that Kikuoka would forbid her performing if he found out about it. Fumiko had no problem with me attending the concert and seeing this student of Kikuoka’s whom I saw regularly at the lesson place. But she was afraid that Akiko would surely tell Kikuoka. “Please feel free to invite your friends to this concert,” she explained, “but not if they have any connection to Kikuoka.” When I naively told her that I did not think it would be such a big problem, she explained to me that such restrictions had been imposed on her in the past and she had learned to be very careful about who found out about concerts that might be objectionable to one’s teacher. After complaining bitterly about this common problem I assured her that I would not say a word about the concert to anyone.
