Archive: 2021-05-09

  • Week 18: Pop goes the shamisen

    I took out my shamisen from its case to find that the skin had torn. It’s the inevitable fate of any shamisen: the body is a wooden box with a skin stretched very taut and glued on. Eventually, the stresses, exacerbated by climatic variation, get too much and one day you open up the case to see this:

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