2010-07-29

Konkai

"Konkai" 吼噦 is an old jiuta 地唄* song that I first heard on an album by Yokoyama "November Steps" Katsuya 横山勝也. The album is Recital '81, a CD release of... a recital from 1981, and "Konkai" is performed as a duet with Sawai Tadao 沢井忠夫 on shamisen in an arrangement credited to Araki Kodō 荒木古童 II. (The original composition is generally credited to Kishino Jirosaburō 岸野次郎三郎, and the lyrics to Tamon Shōzaemon 多門庄左衛門 II.)

It turns out that "Konkai" is one of the oldest songs in the jiuta repertoire, dating to no earlier later than 1703. It's actually an example of shibai jiuta 芝居地唄, "theater jiuta", meaning that it originally accompanied singing, dancing, and miscellaneous revelry on-stage. This, Yokohama muses, might be why the song shifts gears so much (緩急が大変多い); the version on Recital '81 is certainly a rocking performance.

The lyrics are a bit obscure. Yamato Hōmei 山戸朋盟 notes that the absence of contemporary commentary makes it difficult to be sure, but it seems to be a fox story in the Kuzu no Ha tradition (a Shinoda-zuma mono 信太妻物), except with genders reversed:

A son asks a traveling priest to help his sick mother, only to discover that the priest is actually a fox. He chases the fox off, but the fox has fallen in love with his mother, and interpolates a popular song about it:

Over fields, over mountains, through the villages,
For whose sake did I come? — For yours.
When I came, for whose sake was it? For whose sake did I come? — For yours.

The fox-priest then progresses through "Baby I love you," "Credo in Amida Butsu," and finally "Welp, off to my lonely home I go" before the song ends inconclusively. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

Incidentally, the kyōgen play of the same name has nothing at all to do with the jiuta. Also known as "Tsurigitsune" ("Fox-trapping"), it is about a fox who disguises himself as a fox-trapper's uncle, a priest, in an attempt to convince the trapper to renounce his fox-killing ways but, predictably, ends up trapped himself.

Let me note in closing that the second character in the title 吼噦 is quite obscure (Yahoo! won't even display it as text), and probably as a result this piece is also listed under spellings such as 吼かい, こんくわい (an archaic spelling, but we are talking about 18th-century music here) and even 狐会. Not convenient.

* I recently learned that the spelling 地唄 for jiuta is an Edo thing. On the original jiuta turf nearer to the capital, they prefer 地歌. Unfortunately for them, I am an Edo partisan, and anyway, we totally won. Ha ha! (Back)

Popularity factor: 8

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Leonardo Boiko:

> Over fields, over mountains, through the villages,
For whose sake did I come? — For yours.
When I came, for whose sake was it? For whose sake did I come? — For yours.

Once again I am completely unable to read the sequence of letters “sake” as an English word.

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language hat:

"Konkai is one of the oldest songs in the jiuta repertoire, dating to no earlier than 1703."

How do they know? Did somebody say in 1702 "I'd sure like it if there were a song called Konkai -- maybe somebody will write one"?

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Matt:

Whoops, that should read "no later" -- and now it does. This makes the reasoning much clearer: it appeared in a book in that year.

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language hat:

Once again, a tiny bit of mystery goes out of the world.

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Matt:

I hope you're satisfied, Mr Copy Editor.

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Carl:

@Leo

That's why I always write it saké. And Pokémon.

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Leonardo Boiko:

Unfortunately I’m a native speaker of Portuguese. To read “sake” as [sa.ke] makes a lot of sense to me. To read it as [seɪk]… well, doesn’t. And I cannot avoid mentally sounding saké as [sa'kɛ].

…but it does mean lots of private amusement :)

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Carl:

True facts, English spelling has some of the dumbest rules in the world—change a vowel to a long vowel by putting an e somewhere in the word, not necessarily next to the vowel you're changing. I can't say that these rules make sense to me either, but I respect that it all has something to do with the Great Vowel Shift and maybe King James.

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