Janet Pocorobba - The Fourth String: A Memoir of Sensei and Me

Writers in praise of The Fourth String

Moving and provocative, The Fourth String charts a profound journey into the heart of another culture. What does it mean to teach and be taught? What does it mean to transform and be transformed? Are teacher and student finally, above all, comrades? This memoirpart biography, part autobiography, part portrait of an alchemyis as transmuting as its subject, and a joy to read.

Gish Jen, author of The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap

The Fourth String is one of the most beautiful memoirs Ive read in a long time. And by beautiful Im not simply referring to its spare, elegant language but to the exceptional beauty of its spirit. This is an insightful and deeply generous book written by a woman as open to surprises within herself as she is to the revelations she discovers about her temporarily adoptive country of Japan. Janet Pocorobba is by turns curious, funny, sensitive, and always, always brave.

Pamela Petro, author of Sitting up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South

The Fourth String is a piercingly insightful memoir of a young womans search for herself by diving into the demanding traditional art form of the shamisen in a country renowned for keeping outsiders at arms length. With unflinching observation of Japanese society and human relationships, she details her own entanglements with art and self-knowledge.

Liza Dalby is an anthropologist, writer, and scroll mounter

Exquisitely written takes us on a spiritual quest in a new country and culture, the soul of a place whose past secures hope and whose present yearns for modernity.

Rachel Manley, author of Drumblair, winner of Canadas Governor Generals Award for Literature

Ms. Pocorobba tells an eloquent and insightful story about Japanese music and culture. Her observations shed light on our longing for beauty and purpose. In Japan, she informs us, a child at birth is not age zero but one, which means that the first year is grown into, a shape chosen for her to reach. She does not have to become anything that has not existed already. Ms. Pocorobbas story compellingly explores this paradox: the arduous journey a person must undertake to become the musician or artist she was always meant to be.

Kyoko Mori, author of Yarn: Remembering the Way Home

In this hauntingly beautiful memoir, Janet Pocorobba shows us a world within a world that weve never seen before. This is a Japan where ancient and modern meet, where longing and belonging, foreign and familiar, are searingly depicted within the lives of two women. Pocorobbas achievement is the subtle way shes transformed how memoir so often only explores the men in mentor. In her hands, narrator and writer alike master complex and completely new notes deep within that most foreign of countries: the human psyche.

Alexandra Johnson, author of The Hidden Writer, recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award Citation for nonfiction

With lyrical prose and elegant precision, Pocorobba tells a gripping story of teacher and student, practice and dreams, and the ways we listen to our own music and discover our true self.

Hester Kaplan, author of Unravished

The intimate, evocative world unveiled in Janet Pocorobbas The Fourth String is a compelling place to visit. An effortless read by a writer who manages the impossiblecapturing the ephemeral.

Elizabeth Dowd, Noh Training Project US, Producing Director

The Fourth String transports you into the exquisite minutiae of thoughtful, aesthetically oriented gaijin life in Japan.

Leonard Koren, author of Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Published by

Stone Bridge Press

P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

TEL 510-524-8732

Text 2019 Janet Pocorobba.

Photograph of author by Sharona Jacobs.

Cover design by Linda Ronan. Typography and layout by Peter Goodman.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019

P-ISBN 978-1-61172-046-4

E-ISBN 978-1-61172-934-4

For M.N. and R.L.,
my listeners,
and for my parents

Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.

FLORIDA SCOTT-MAXWELL