Transmission and Textuality in the Narrative Traditions of Blind Biwa players

Biwa narrative music continues to be practised in the major cities of modern Japan, but its rural counterpart in Kyushu (south-western Japan), a tradition known as zatô biwa, has all but ceased. Zatô biwa practice is unlike the styles that have developed in urban contexts in both musical and literary aspects. Heike biwa, the tradition of chanting episodes of the medieval Tale of the Heike with biwa accompaniment, and the Chikuzen biwa and Satsuma biwa traditions that are today the most frequently heard styles of biwa narrative, are text-based practices in which items of repertory have fixed verbal content and stable performative schemes inscribed in texts. In rural Kyushu, however, zatô biwa was until the 1980s a primarily blind tradition in which written text sources were thought to have been of little or no consequence for performance practice.¹