Word: biwa
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...parts. In the first we hear the recitation of a ballad relating a famous battle between two Japanese dynasties, while on screen Kobayashi fades back and forth between a pictorial representation of the battle and actors performing it. There is an almost faultless synthesis between the haunting of the biwa, the incantatory recitation, and the elaborate pageantry of the image. Kwaidan is reputed to have had one of the highest budgets in Japanese film history, and this shows up in the sumptuousness of the ballad sequence. But it is a sumptuousness that doesn't continually point to itself, flaunting...
...shimmering sonority into which the winds and brass poked tiny pin points, like stars among scudding clouds. Through it all one black-and-grey-robed soloist warbled the mournful, breathy tones of the shakuhachi, a bamboo flute, while another tapped the strings of the lutelike biwa with a wooden plectrum, suggesting the sharp, dry crunch of dead branches in an icy forest...
France Nuyen makes one last try. It involves a weekend at Lake Biwa, a sort of Nipponese Grossinger's, where she has arranged for Harvey to shoot some pictures. With the rain pelting on the roof of the bungalow, she serves dinner on the floor, lets down her hair, and the background music comes to a crescendo. (The theme, mystifyingly, seems to be something that Composer Elmer Bernstein remembered from Composer Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story...
...Japan last week the Eighth Army had abuilding the largest project yet: 55 acres at Chofu, 15 miles from Tokyo on the Tawa River; 25 acres at Otsu, six miles north of Kyoto on Lake Biwa. It hoped to harvest 120,000 Ibs. (some eight servings for every U.S. soldier in Japan and Korea) of fresh vegetables a week by next spring. Reason for the project: Japanese soil has been heavily fertilized with night soil for centuries; vegetables grown in such farmland are fresh but may harbor disease-producing bacteria like the typhoid bacillus...
...quote the Bulletin's account. "The cemetery where this unique memorial to a Harvard teacher is to be preserved commands a view of the blue waters of Lake Biwa. It is situated in the very heart of Japan, in surroundings which have many associations with the religion, philosophy, and literature of Japan, of which Professor Woods had long been an eager and sympathetic student...