Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan by Gerald Groemer (review)

Gerald Groemer’s Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan is an exhaustively researched work of historical musicology on the visually disabled women musicians of Japan called goze. In his book, Groemer traces the emergence and coalescence of goze into performing groups in the Edo period, the challenges of their occupational “liberation” in the Meiji period, and the gradual dissolution of goze organizations over the course of the twentieth century. Those scholars familiar with his previous work will not be surprised by this choice of subject. Groemer’s The Spirit of Tsugaru: Blind Musicians, Tsugaru-jamisen, and the Folk Music of Northern Japan (Harmonie Park Press, 1999) remains the most comprehensive treatment available in English of the shamisen music of northern Japan, a folk genre in which the most important innovators were blind men. The music of the socially and geographically marginal is clearly of great interest to Groemer, and in devoting two monographs to it he effectively reverses the dominant gaze of Japanese musicology, one which usually begins with the music of religious and imperial court ritual, moves through an overview of the classical stage arts, and concludes with some mention of folk and popular styles. Instead, in Groemer’s writing, the folk are front and center; classical elements receive mention only when they are intentionally incorporated into performance by folk musicians. In so doing, Groemer seems to be motivated by the laudable desire not just to write about the music of Japan’s marginal groups but to write their music into the field of Japanese ethnomusicology, or, to be more specific, English-language scholarship on Japanese music.

As a detailed description of the lives and music of Japan’s blind female shamisen players, Goze is a great success. Groemer draws heavily on Japanese primary and secondary sources in constructing his account. He thus brings the insights of Japanese researchers to a much larger scholarly public. But, for too much of the book, Groemer’s narrative stays within the descriptive and taxonomic mode characteristic of much native and foreign scholarship on Japanese music. Aside from the formal analysis of song texts and musical structure, Groemer’s book rarely moves beyond description and classification either to make a persuasive argument about what goze represent or to engage substantively with social theories of disability, performance, and gender that might aid in understanding them from a broader perspective.

In the introduction, Groemer tells us that the word “goze” was originally a polite way to refer to a woman. Eventually, though it is not clear how, the term came to refer exclusively to blind female musicians. Their activities centered in the Echigo region of Edo-period Japan (now Niigata Prefecture), largely because of the unique adaptation of domestic architecture to the winter weather of the region: goze found the outdoor hallways created by the overhanging eaves of row homes convenient in their itinerant search for paying customers. The chapter provides additional accounts of goze by European visitors to Japan and by native Japanese folklore scholars. Interesting as these anecdotes are, it would have been beneficial to have included as well some statement of the argument of the book in this chapter, or in the preceding preface, that would help the reader place this and other parts of the book into context.

Clearly, the status of goze as visually disabled is a key defining characteristic of their occupational identity. In the first chapter, Groemer focuses his discussion on what he calls the “production of visual disability” (p. 15). The chapter moves through early Buddhist understandings of disability rooted in the transgressions of past lives to biomedical objectifications of disability in late Edo and Meiji-period Japan. Groemer shows that, regardless of the intellectual paradigm within which visual disability was understood, the end result was the same: the production of a disabled subject (p. 34). Neither in medieval nor in modern Japan did...