Koto - 琴

In Episode 4 of Book 6, Takakura sends out a young official named Nakakuni to find a gentlewoman of his, Kogo, who had vanished from the capital after hearing threats from Kiyomori to have her removed. Nakakuni notes that if he searched every single-gated home in Saga, where she was rumored to be, he might be able to catch the sound her playing the koto. He’d know her koto playing anywhere, for he had accompanied her on the flute many a time in the past. As it turns out, he did indeed was able to hear the sound of her koto as he was passing through Kameyama.

This method of finding women in hiding by listening for their koto music is a popular trope in Japanese literature, especially literature of the Heian period. It is thought that the koto was brought to Japan from China around the 9th century. Of the two forms, bridged and unbridged, that were developed in China, it was the bridged form that became popular in Japan. Koto (琴) was originally a word used for any stringed instrument, but it eventually came to mean the 12 or 13-stringed, bridged horizontal zither.

The koto started out as an instrument of the court, and then during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) slowly drifted into mainstream as an instrument played by the daughters of the commercial class. The koto has survived Westernization and is seen as an important national instrument of Japan.

While laying horizontally, the koto is meant to be plucked by the player wearing pluckers on their fingers. The pitch of each string may be lowered by pressing down on it at various places. The koto has a gentle, harp-like tone that Malm claims “added a gentle hue to the generally gaudy picture of Japan from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries” (Malm, 165). As the koto was mostly played by nobility during the Heian period, evidence of koto playing decreased during the Kamakura period with the decline of imperial power. It then came back around the 16th century from a school based in Kyushu, Tsukushi, to where noble women who survived the Genpei war fled, having apparently took their koto musicality with them. The Tsukushi school based their koto music on “imayo, roei, and saibara, the three main vocal genre of the court” (Malm, 167), and koto music now stems from the Tsukushi school; modern-day koto music is played slowly and languidly in a style similar to imayo.

The construction of the koto is said to mirror the shape of a dragon. Modern day koto is made with 13 silk strings and two pieces of paulownia wood. The adjustable bridges can be made by wood, ivory, or plastic.

Source: Malm, William P. "Koto Music." Japanese Music and Musical Instruments. Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1959, pp. 165-183. Print.

For more information on the koto instrument from professional koto player Anne Prescott, see the bottom of the page here.