Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/78

54 to play an instrument, the body of which was made of snake-skin, to ward them off, as the sound it emitted resembled the cry of a certain animal that preyed on them. Thus, from necessity the instrument came into general use with the Loochooans, among whom it was known as the jamisen, or snake-skin strings. It was introduced into Japan about 1558, and a blind musician named Ishimura improved it by substituting cat-skin for the snake-skin, making the body square instead of round, and tuning its three strings to the first, second, and fourth strings of the biwa. The samisen was further improved by two other blind musicians, Yanagawa and Yatsuhashi, who brought it to its present state in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century. Yatsuhashi died in 1685, at the age of over seventy. A contemporary of theirs named Sawazumi, also a blind musician, applied the samisen to the joruri, and after that, it soon found its way to the stage. By the end of the seventeenth century it had become the favourite instrument of the people. In its usual dimensions, the samisen consists of an oblong belly with convex sides, 7¾ inches long in the middle and 7 inches at the edge, and 7 inches wide in the middle and 6¼ inches at the edge, to which a neck, about two feet and an inch long is attached, with a tail-piece 5½ inches long. There are three pegs on the tail-piece for tightening the strings which are carried over the neck to the other end of the belly where a further tension is given them by a little movable bridge. The belly rests on the right knee of the player, who strikes the strings with an ivory plectrum, while the fingers of the left hand support the neck and stop the strings. The range of the samisen is about three octaves. The top-string is the thickest and the third the slenderest. Its thirty-six notes, including the sharps and flats, are usually distributed five to the first string, seven to the second, and twenty-four to the third; but two notes are sometimes shifted from the second to the first or the third string.