Prof Laura Moretti brought a rare type of music from early modern Japan to Cambridge. Shinnai bushi is a form of "narrative music" where a tayū recites a story to the accompaniment of the shamisen. With lyrics imbued with the melodrama of tragic love, shinnai bushi was extremely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara.
Featuring Master Okamoto Miyanosuke 岡本宮之助 and shamiser performer Okamoto Toranosuke 岡本虎之助, the event was held in the Queen's Theatre at Emmanuel College and attracted a large audience.
The event was organized in conjunction with the thirteenth edition of the Mitsubishi Corporation Summer School in Early Modern Japanese Palaeography. The participants of the summer school, who gathered like every year from all over the world to learn how to decode, read, and translate early modern Japanese texts in their original format, also read part of the script of the second piece that was performed.
The event was possible thanks to the support of Prof Fukuda Yasunori (Japan Women's University) and Prof Konoe Noriko (Komazawa University).
We would like to thank our sponsor, Mitsubishi Corporation London Branch, for their sustained support in making the University of Cambridge the beating heart of the study of early modern Japanese culture.
