'The Fourth String: A Memoir of Sensei and Me': Music, life and reflections on the space in between

Janet Pocorobba’s “The Fourth String” reconfigures the typical Japan fish-out-of-water memoir into a meditation on music and mastery, relationships, culture and narrative. Pocorobba was 28 years old when she and her then-boyfriend arrived in Japan in the late ’90s to teach English.

A talented musician, Pocorobba was drawn to an English advertisement offering free shamisen lessons, an instrument she’d never played before. Thus started her lifelong relationship with the shamisen and her teacher, “Sensei” — though Sensei never accepted that title for herself. Offering free lessons to non-Japanese, Sensei rejected teaching native students or teaching for money as a way to subvert the strict, hierarchical systems within the traditional Japanese arts, only offering a vague explanation to Pocorobba, it’s “complicated.”

“When I came back from Japan, I thought I could just leave, and that would be the end,” says Pocorobba. “But it wasn’t. As the book shows, Japan for me was about this relationship and how powerful it was and what an impact the whole experience had on me. I didn’t want to portray the same, ‘I went to Japan and I did this, and here’s the funny stories’ experience. That narrative just wasn’t true to my experience; there was so much going on in my mind at the time, so much angst, so much identity and growth.”

Subtitled “A Memoir of Sensei and Me,” Pocorobba deliberately embraces a dual narrative through which she explores not only her own journey but that of her teacher’s, what becomes essentially a compelling meditation on humanity and aspiration, where teacher and student stride or stumble together.

Pocorobba believes the emphasis on that relationship between student and teacher is an Eastern way of thinking that contrasts with typical Western ideas of learning that may be more result-focused. “In my Western mind, mastery was something I felt I could earn, and then it would change me. But you can’t. You’ll always wrestle with yourself,” she says.

“I thought I was aiming for perfection. I thought that’s what it was about,” Pocorobba continues. “But I think my experiences taught me a Japanese idea of mastery: You can’t be perfect. Only the effort is perfect. You make the perfect effort. No one will always play perfectly and to try is almost foolish, it’s not important. What you absorb along the way is most important.” With the book’s title, Pocorobba pays tribute to these intangible connections between teacher and student, the invisible “fourth string” on the three-stringed shamisen.

Pocorobba stayed in Japan for four years, studying intensely and eventually breaking up with her boyfriend. Lessons frequently required on-stage performances as one Sensei’s selected group of musicians. Even after returning to the States, for many years she lived “in-between,” studying with Sensei over recorded tapes or long telephone conversations.

The book’s descriptions of learning, however, transcend musical study into a study of life. As Pocorobba writes, “The music itself was vexing, with the ma, and the hard-to-find notes, and the discomfort of merely holding the instrument in my lap. But it stirred my desire, which stirred my ambition. And longing. I recognized the reverberant, sad, solitary sounds immediately as the same ones that followed me through the streets of Odawara.”

Ma, or the space in between, becomes an important idea in the book, and the concept is reflected in Pocorobba’s writing style. The narrative structure follows a meandering pattern with much left unsaid, and without a straightforward chronological order. It contains many moments of pause and reflectiveness. Pocorobba’s style also sets the memoir apart, as her word choice and turn of phrase is unexpectedly vivid, juxtaposing dissimilar images or infusing her descriptions with a sly humor, as when she describes Sensei’s traditional tabi socks, worn with kimono, after a performance: “By the end of the day her tabi looked ecstatically shabby.”

“I came with a kind of naive, orientalist fantasy about Japan,” Pocorobba admits. “But, as a young woman, I also had fantasies for my own possibilities in the world. I met Sensei and she was such an unexpected, surprising role model, independent, doing her thing, living a life of passion and music. And it intrigued me. I felt like we were on the same page and that I could learn from her about life.”

Pocorobba credits Sensei with giving her the resolve to pursue another artistic passion, writing. “Japan made me a writer. The discipline, form and structure I learned from Sensei, it gave me the tools to find my own destiny in the arts.”

Currently the associate director and a teacher of creative writing at Lesley University in the Boston area, Pocorobba also teaches the shamisen and still occasionally returns to Japan for performances with Sensei’s orchestral group of non-Japanese musicians, most recently last winter, where she shared her memoir with Sensei.

“Many of my Japanese students in America wanted to learn more about their culture, and learning the shamisen was a way for them to do that. I found that teaching them was a way to pass on Sensei’s mission, and also to express my profound love for the music and the culture of Japan.”