Rites and Tales with BIWA: Yamashika Yoshiyuki, Blind Musician of Kyushu

Abstract

The music on this CD-set is a selection of recordings representative of the repertory of Yamashika Yoshiyuki (1901-1996), a blind musician and ritualist of Nankan-chô in central Kyushu's Kumamoto Prefecture. As the last person to have earned his income from performing a repertory of narratives, songs and rites with 'biwa', to many he seemed to be a twentieth-century apparition of the medieval 'biwa hôshi' - blind singers associated in Japanese popular culture with the carnage and strife that led to the start of warrior rule in the late twelfth century. Yamashika's identity as a musician and individual was far more complex, but from the mid-1970s he became well known as 'the last biwa hôshi', and was the subject of several books, television programmes, and an award-winning documentary film.