Briefly, an ode to Misora Hibari
▣ Let me move in concentric circles. ▣
▣ The review has stuck with me, since its language was so simple and striking. Live at the Cimarron Ballroom. “First show after the 1961 car wreck, scars on her face, and admission was $1.50.” I bought the compact disc in Niagara Falls a short time after reading that. I’m not sure what I expected, but I suppose something rootsy and raw, not the clean contralto and polished backing band going through pop singles, with banter about woman drivers. I was a kid; It didn’t hit me then, but it hits me now, in the same way that Judy at Carnegie Hall does, and in the same way that Misora Hibari’s final recordings do. ▣
▣ The first time I recounted falling in love with Misora Hibari, I started in Beijing in 1966. That piece of writing is probably impossible for you to find, so I can plagiarize it here. ▣ I was reading Zhang Chengzhi. He was one of the Tsinghua University Middle School students that Mao Zedong addressed in that summer: “You say it is right to rebel against reactionaries; I enthusiastically support you.” He followed the Chairman’s directive. Finally, his rebellion was cut short by the intervention of the Workers' Propaganda Teams and the military. He was among those recalcitrant youth sent down to the countryside. He volunteered, in fact, and was dispatched to Inner Mongolia. ▣ He returned to the city in 1978. He studied archeology and began writing. He went out to Gansu, doing field work. He rediscovered his faith. He had been born into a non-practicing Hui Muslim family, but found the truth in a rebellious Sufi sect called Jahriyya. Theirs was a revolutionary Islam that had fueled revolts against the Qing. His writing went in another direction. He published a history of the Jahriyya sect. ▣ Zhang Chengzhi went to Japan. While most Chinese sojourners in Japan in the 1980s were fascinated by the country’s postwar industrialization and immense wealth, Zhang Chengzhi was interested in what was left of Japanese radicalism. He was fascinated by student protesters and the Japanese Red Army, who he saw as part of the same global struggle that he had fought against Western liberal democracy. He became enamored with the protest singer Okabayashi Nobuyasu. ▣ “I quickly grew tired of all the ambiguity and obscurantism in the fiction of the time,” Zhang Chengzhi wrote. “A friend introduced me to the music of Okabayashi.” Okabayashi came from the protest movement of the 1960s. He was a folk singer. Unlike Zhang Chengzhi, who rediscovered faith after radical politics, Okabayashi gave up his religion for rebellion. His father was a follower of the Omi Brotherhood, founded by William Merrell Vories, a missionary that had stayed in Japan through the 1930s and 1940s, becoming a naturalized Japanese citizen and swearing an oath to the Emperor. Okabayashi became a star among the students of ‘68. The movement burned itself out. Okabayashi burned himself out. Okabayashi started a rock band. He gave up on rock music. He found enka. ▣ Enka is pop music. Its heyday was in the prewar period. It is not old, even though it does call back to earlier forms. It is not essentially Japanese, either, although its use of pentatonic minor scale gives it a now characteristically Japanese sound. Lyrically, it’s heavy on emotional pain and doomed romance. ▣ Zhang Chengzhi was disappointed that Okabayashi had given up on political music. The two men met in 1984 or 1985, following Zhang’s publication in a Japanese journal of an essay, called “A Hopeless Avant-garde,” on Okabayashi and political art. In another essay from around that time, “Singers are like Guerrillas,” Zhang Chengzhi reminisces about Okabayashi singing his daughter to sleep. ▣ It was reading about Okabayashi because of Zhang Chengzhi that led me to pay attention to Misora Hibari. I watched a clip of them together—Okabayashi and Misora Hibari—on a studio stage sometime in the late 1970s. He was respectful and quiet. She was sad and glassy-eyed. They together a song called “Floating on the Wind,” which he had written for her. ▣
▣ Alan Tansman explains what enka and Misora Hibari in particular represented: By the time Misora Hibari first sang "Mournful Sake" in 1966, she and Japan—like Frank Sinatra and the United States in the 1960s—had begun to drift apart. "Even in the 1960s," writes one critic, "she gave off the aroma of the farm, of the trainloads of pupils transported to Tokyo en masse to work." As she sang of enduring the anguish of lost love and of painful partings, in the mournful melodies of the minor pentatonic scale, Hibari's boozy sensibility no longer spoke to many in a nation buoyed by economic success. Though she had suffered with the people in the ruins of postwar Japan, the people had moved on and hence no longer needed her. To many, hers was the music of a dead nation. ▣ The music she sang was not explicitly political, as Okabayashi’s earlier folk music had been. It was considered to be on the other end of a political spectrum, we could say. But, as Tansman argues, it was a deeply political act to cling to enka. Misora Hibari, he writes, “was a heroine of, for, and by the people in their resistance to the 'democratic' ideal seen to have been imposed by the United States on a defeated Japan.” ▣ In pop music, the war had not happened, but in enka, it was being remembered. Misora Hibari would still sing songs like “Brothers-in-Arms,” about the Manchurian front, and “Mother at Kudan,” which tells the story of a mother visiting her son’s grave at Yasukuni. These songs are not celebrations of the war or Japanese aggression. They are laments for lives lost. To perform them in the 1960s and 1970s, in a country where remembrances of the Second World War were split between shame and denialism, was a powerful statement. ▣ Perhaps Okabayashi Nobuyasu realized it, even if Zhang Chengzhi couldn’t understand it. Enka was resistance to Americanization in all forms. ▣
▣ But there is more to it, since there were many great enka singers… You know that I love Miyako Harumi. You know that I have a soft spot for Ishikawa Sayuri. But Misora Hibari was different. There is a reason that she became the most famous woman in the country. There is a reason that the Showa ended not with the death of a monarch but with the death of the singer. ▣ It is because her story is tragic. It is because she was doomed. It is because despite her immense talent, and despite the love for her broadcast by millions, she could never be impressed with her own work, and she could never feel the emotion. When she wept, she wept for the nation—a dead nation, as Tansman says—but also for more pedestrian, relatable reasons. She wept because she never found a soulmate, and because her career was stymied, and because her brother was a delinquent, and because she had to look after his child. She was dogged by rumors—that she was, in fact, Korean, or that she was a lesbian. ▣ We love her for the same reason we might love Patsy Cline with scars on her face, or Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall in 1961, because they are perfect because of the pain we imagine that we can still hear in their voices. ▣
▣ There is just enough here to care. There is not enough to understand. ▣