Haru Kobayashi, known as the last of the goze or blind women who travelled across rural Japan singing folk songs and playing the traditional three-string lute from door to door, died on Monday at age 105.
Kobayashi, who could reportedly recite 500 songs when she was in her 90s, succumbed to old age at the Yasuragi-no-ie (House of Comfort) nursing home in Niigata, a rice-growing region north of Tokyo.
”She had been fed through tubes for the past 19 months. She could hardly talk although she was conscious,” nursing home manager Katsuaki Kon said by telephone.
Until recently, caregivers played her own recordings for Kobayashi, who was blind since she was 100 days old.
”She responded by fluttering her eyelids,” Kon said.
Kobayashi hailed from Niigata, about 250km north of Tokyo, which produced many goze singers and storytellers when entertainment was scarce in the countryside, especially in the snowy winter months.
In 1978, she was designated by the government as a living national treasure for her life on the road, which started when she joined a troupe of goze entertainers at the age of five.
Goze singers are said to have cropped up in the 16th century and spread throughout the country in the feudal period of Edo (1600-1868), providing a means of income for the blind.
But they quickly faded from the scene after World War II as the country embarked on rapid industrialisation. Highly organised, they had a long tradition of travelling from village to village in small groups.
Kobayashi was believed to be the last person who could perform and hand down to other people the art of goze, which included folk and popular ballads as well as sequences of lyrics mixed with recitation based on religious teachings.
She kept travelling with the lute known as a shamisen for 68 years until she settled at a nursing home for the first time in 1973.
Four years later, she moved to her present home, an event she called the ”happiest of my life”.
The nursing-home manager remembered that Kobayashi sang in his room with a Noh play artist in 2003, which might have been her last public performance.
”Her powerful, clear voice was stinging. It sounded as if it came from the bottom of her guts,” Kon said.
It was not known if Kobayashi had relatives close to her. But her friends and students were expected to attend her funeral on Thursday. — Sapa-AFP