Donald Keene’s Son Puts Basho to Music at Performance in Tokyo; Marking Date His Father Became a Japanese Citizen

By Futoshi Mori / Japan News Senior Writer

13:48 JST, March 10, 2025

A shamisen performance by Seiki Keene, the adopted son of Japanologist Donald Keene, was held in Tokyo on Saturday. Seiki, 74, played the shamisen professionally for joruri puppet plays for a quarter century. At the event, he performed his own composition for Matsuo Basho’s “Oku no Hosomichi” (The narrow road to Oku) and the old joruri piece “Kochi-hoin Godenki,” minus the puppets. He was using the stage name Echigo Kakutayu, which was given to him by Keene.

The event coincided with the date that Keene acquired Japanese nationality, March 8, and Yukio Kakuchi, who translated many of Keene’s late works, served as emcee. The performance took place in the Otani Museum in the Kyu Furukawa Gardens in Kita Ward, Tokyo. Built in the Taisho-era, the museum building was designed by Josiah Conder, who is known as the father of modern Japanese architecture. Around 50 people who won a lottery got to watch the performance in a Japanese-style room on the second floor.

Kakutayu performed the opening part of “Oku no Hosomichi,” which lasted for around 18 minutes, and as he played the shamisen, his voice rang out strong and vibrant. Keene loved Basho’s original work so much that he translated it multiple times and used it every year in his classes at Columbia University. He had hoped that Kakutayu would set the travel diary to music.

“While my father was still alive, he suggested I try to compose a joruri piece for it,” Kakutayu told the audience. “I finally completed my composition after he passed away. But it’s still only about a quarter or a fifth of the whole piece. I am determined to finish it.”

As for “Kochi-hoin Godenki,” the old play has had special meaning for Kakutayu. He was involved in a revival performance in 2009, the first in over 300 years, and in 2017 he visited London with Keene and performed the joruri at the British Library.

The play has had a strange history. It was published in 1685 in the early Edo period, but every copy of it in Japan was lost. A German doctor took a copy abroad from Dejima in Nagasaki, but that was forgotten about. Nearly three centuries later, in 1963, the late Bunzo Torigoe, a professor emeritus at Waseda University, was asked by the British Museum to examine a collection of unidentified books. He discovered that one of the books, mislabeled in 1770 as a “Chinese story book,” was actually the Japanese play.

The play’s story is modeled after the high priest Kochi, whose mummy is enshrined at Saishoji Temple in Nagaoka, Niigata Prefecture. Monks such as Kochi, who are said to have mummified themselves by eating a special diet of foods, are called “sokushin-butsu.” In the play, a man joins the Buddhist priesthood after the death of his wife and becomes a sokushin-butsu after much ascetic training. Before he dies, a demon disguised as a beautiful woman tries to trick him, but he is not deceived.

At the event on Saturday, an old TV program was also shown in which Keene said in Japanese: “In this puppet play, one person operates a single puppet. The movements are faster and more interesting than in the three-person puppet plays [that became the norm later on]. The story is also unusual. It’s an old work that is fresh and new.”

The emcee, Kakuchi, had the audience smiling when he said, “Since it’s Keene-san, I’m sure he’s drifting around here today, enjoying the event.”