Doll artist Ozawa Yasuko sent this flier from a long-ago exhibition in Kyoto, of the paintings of Saito Shinichi. The triptych shows some of the paintings that catapulted him to fame. When I first saw Ozawa's mysterious cat dolls, I knew that I had to interview her. When I did that, we discovered that we both were fascinated by the wandering blind female musicians called goze.I later interviewed Saito Shinichi, who himself had heard stories of the goze while traveling around Japan. His interest led him to Joetsu (formerly Takada) in the heart of Japan's snow country, in Niigata prefecture. Takada was long a center for goze. Ozawa introduced me to an educator in Joetsu, named Ichikawa Nobuo, who had spent years documenting the goze in the area. When I met him, he showed me his treasure trove of old photographs of the women, who walked from town to town performing on 'door steps' and at shrines and temples, bringing news from the greater world to the isolated hamlets they visited.
For centuries, the only viable occupations for blind girls were those of goze or masseuse. Neither was an easy life, but the Takada goze were organized into guildlike houses, with strict codes of behavior, where young blind girls were trained in their craft, learning to play the shamisen and to sing the ballads and other songs that made up the goze repertoire. They were able to earn a living that also gave them a haven in old age.
Eventually, I was priviledged to interview Kobayashi Haru, the last of the full-time goze, who at the time was living in a retirement home for the blind in rural Niigata. It was a day in winter, with snow piled many feet high outside. Kobayashi died, at age 105, in 2005. When I interviewed her, about 15 years earlier, she was already a frail elder. At one point in the interview, though, she sang a couple of songs for me. Granted I was seated across a table, albeit a wide one, from her but when the diminutive Kobayashi started singing, I felt as if I had just been pinned to the wall behind me. Even at her age, her voice had extraordinary power.
Kobayashi, who had gone blind as a child, described how she had to train as a goze. At age 10, in the coldest part of the winter, she had to stand on the bank of a local river and, clad only in a cotton kimono, she had to throw her voice to the opposite side of the river. Over and over and over again. A lot of training in the arts embodies the adage, what does not kill you makes you stronger. In a book written about her, Kobayashi is quoted as saying that traveling with someone good is a festival, but with someone bad it's sheer hell. As a goze, she was exposed to her share of both. From a distance, the goze seem impossibly romantic and brave, but at age 90, Kobayashi Haru was grateful to be in the safe cocoon of a retirement home.
