Word: samisens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...culture into his one and only book. Poidatz took his pen name Thomas Raucat from the Japanese tomar? ka, meaning "Will you stay the night here?", which when asked by a hotelkeeper takes on a double meaning. Though it has hints of a French boudoir farce scored for samisen, the novel's double meanings are mainly of another sort ? that of a Westerner looking at the Japanese looking at themselves...
...Pittsburgh of Japan, in a brisk, U.S.-style election campaign. He made a big hit. A caretaker Premier for only ten weeks, savvy Old Politician Hatoyama was determined to win a longer lease on the job. He did not hesitate to promise the moon, or to strum the samisen strings of renascent Japanese nationalism...
...introverted mood of the picture is uncannily enhanced by the musical score. The cold, otherworldly picking of the samisen snips the threads of reality one by one, and the audience floats free among music that tries to express the intimate noises of the toiling spirit. The photography never once permits this mood to falter. Even the most violent scenes are dissolved in a meditative mist, like terrors in the mind of a sage. The moviegoer has the sense of living in a classic Japanese watercolor or of walking on a world that is really a giant pearl...
Aiko Nagai, the plump geisha, poked hopefully among the ruins of her house. "All I saved was my samisen [three-stringed guitar]," she said, "but I'm going to entertain at a party tonight. Thank heaven, in our business we don't have to worry so much about equipment...