Kutu

I only recently learned from an island calendar that September 10 is a day dedicated to the koto in Okinawa.

On the calendar it was written:

箏（くとぅ）の日 — Kutu Day.

The character 箏, usually read koto in standard Japanese, becomes kutu here. When I saw the character, I felt that I had encountered it somewhere before. It was in Yoshie Hotta’s Portraits of Poets in Their Youth. The young poet in the novel had learned the koto from his mother.

Hotta writes that because the instrument had been thoroughly taught to him by his mother at the beginning of his musical education, the boy approached Western music with neither a sense of inferiority nor excessive reverence.

I love this thought.

For the boy, the koto was probably not something called “Japanese traditional music.”

It came through his mother’s hands.

It belonged to the house, to everyday life, to the place he came from. Its sound had entered his body before he had begun choosing what kind of world he wanted to inhabit.

From Fukui to Tokyo. The new city offered new culture, Western music, new ideas and new ways of living. But what the boy carried with him was not small. The sound of a place does not necessarily belong to a genre called “traditional music.” It may be the koto your mother played. A song heard at a festival. It may live in the cadence of language, in prayer, in landscape, or in the memory of what has been passed from one person to another.

When you carry some of that within your body, you do not need to reject the world when you encounter it. Nor do you need to bow before it. You do not have to abandon where you come from in order to face the world.

Knowing a place deeply can become the ground from which we meet the world as equals.

Reading Hotta again, I remembered something else about this young poet that had moved me deeply.

His youth unfolded as Japan moved toward war.

And when Japan finally entered the war against the United States, he came to believe that there might be very little time left for him to live.

Here was a young man reading poetry, listening to music, beginning to discover the world—and watching the possibility of a future close before him.

That feeling stayed with me.

By coincidence, today was also a day when I found myself thinking about September 11. Of course, the fear of a young person living through war and the difficulties I experience in my own daily life are not the same. They should not be made equivalent. An enormous distance separates having one's sleep disturbed by noise, being unsettled by the small irrationalities of everyday life, and living in a time when one could not know how much life remained.

And yet literature sometimes creates a strange moment in which another human heart, separated from ours by history, becomes almost understandable.

Not because our experiences are the same.

Not because our suffering is the same.

But perhaps I understand something about the place within us that keeps listening to music when the future is uncertain.

To read poetry.

To remember where we come from.

To remain moved by something beautiful.

Perhaps it is the heart of art.

Perhaps it is the heart of a place.

I still do not know what to call it.

But a single character—箏—led me from a young poet in Fukui to a small word in Okinawa:

koto.

kutu.

The written character remains the same.

The place changes.

And so does the sound.

Perhaps what matters is not erasing that difference, but listening to it. And perhaps that, too, is one way of going out into the world.