That Name in the Margins
I wasn’t particularly interested in Ōmori Sōkun.
His name would pop in my lessons but I hardly paid attention. Maybe his ghostly presence got offended. In any case, he eventually managed to reach me the way most important things do — by appearing again and again until I stopped ignoring him. And then, like a melody you finally befriend after months battling with it, he was everywhere.
It’s time I told you his story.
His name at birth was Taira Shinkurō. Born in Kyoto in 1570, into a family of warrior lineage.
Shinkurō grew up with music. He studied the hitoyogiri — then simply called shakuhachi, a name eventually borrowed by its successor — under monks, most notably at the temple of Myōken-ji. At the same time, he received Zen training at Daitoku-ji under a Rinzai master, Tenshuku Sōgan. By his early teens, he had already woven together three threads that would define the rest of his life: music, Zen practice, and a warrior ethic he would spend decades translating into something else entirely.
In 1582, when Shinkurō was twelve, Oda Nobunaga was assassinated at the Incident at Honnō-ji. Shinkurō had been in service to the Oda clan — as a page, most likely — and with his lord gone, he found himself at an open crossroads. He chose to leave secular life. Legend has it he began with a dramatic withdrawal into isolation. What it settled into was something subtler: the path of a koji, a lay Buddhist practitioner, rooted in temple culture and Zen practice while remaining fully embedded in the world around him.
The distinction matters. Shinkurō didn’t disappear into a hermitage never to be seen again. He moved through Kyoto’s temple districts, performed at ritual banquets, cultivated relationships with scholars, high-ranking samurai, and eventually the imperial court itself. He was present, engaged, socially fluent. The sokun he would later become was never a recluse — nor a public personality. Until his death, he stood at the edge between withdrawal and presence. This ambiguity, he chose to manifest it early in his adult life, when he took the artistic name Shuan — “Hermitage on the Mountain Peak” — which he used until his death. A gesture toward the ideal, perhaps. A reminder of where his center of gravity was supposed to be, even when life kept pulling outward.
Sokun devoted himself to the hitoyogiri moments before the instrument began to lose ground. For sure, he could feel the oral tradition slip away quietly. Time was running out. Nonetheless, he managed to raise interest one last time for the little flute. And his plan was twofold: popularise it in the zen circles, but also in the folk ones.
But why did the hitoyogiri fall out of favor?
By the late sixteenth century, audiences were already drifting toward the Fuke-style instrument that would eventually claim the name shakuhachi for itself. The reasons were practical: a wider range, a bigger voice, a sound that could fill the spaces where koto and shamisen already played loudly. The hitoyogiri — with its modest octave and a half, its quiet, focused tone — seemed by contrast like something from a previous world.
Sokun saw it differently. He believed the instrument was worth saving, not as an artifact, but as a living practice. He transcribed pieces from the oral tradition. He played in temples, and adapted contemporary melodies for the instrument. He crafted flutes himself — reportedly of exceptional quality — and taught anyone willing to come and learn. By his twenties, his reputation had spread across Kyoto. By his thirties, diary entries from priests at Shōkoku-ji record him playing late into the night at gatherings that were equal parts spiritual event and rather festive banquet.
Around 1605, his music reached Emperor Go-Yōzei, who invited him to court. The emperor was struck enough to commission five flutes, one for each of the instrument’s five modes. One of those flutes, inscribed by the emperor with the characters reion — spiritual tone — has since passed into legend. A few instruments attributed to Sokun have survived: one is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, two others at the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya. When I think about how much of early modern Japan simply didn’t survive the centuries, this feels quietly remarkable.
His school attracted students from across the social spectrum — monks, tea masters, samurai, daimyō retainers. The tea ceremony master Kobori Enshū commissioned a flute from him, which he named “White Rain.” Traces of Sokun’s influence appear in the circle around Tokugawa Ieyasu. Whether he actually taught Ieyasu directly, as some sources suggest, is the kind of claim that invites a raised eyebrow — but that it was even plausible speaks to the position he had built for himself, from nothing, with a small bamboo flute and decades of serious practice.
Formally, he received the honorary title of Hokkyo — Bridge of the Dharma — a recognition traditionally extended to lay artists whose work was understood as a conduit for Buddhist values. Not a religious rank, exactly. A way of acknowledging that what he was doing with music was not separate from the dharma, but continuous with it.
In 1608, Sokun put into writing what would become the earliest known text on hitoyogiri music: the Tanteki Hidenfu, the Secret Notes of the Little Flute. He had probably been teaching and playing for twenty years by then. The urgency behind the manuscript comes through in everything we know about how he worked: he wrote by hand, for his students, who copied and passed the booklets along like fragile treasures.
He was trying to hold on to something that was slipping away. The pieces he compiled moved between two different registers — accessible melodies that drew beginners in, and older, slower, meditative pieces that asked more. Between those poles, he was mapping a practice. Pieces organized by season, by the five chōshi, each mode tied to a different length of instrument, a different tonal world, a different way of listening.
Over the following years, he kept writing. The Sōsa-ryū Shakuhachi Tesu narabini Shoka Mokuroku in 1622. The Shakuhachi Hiden-roku and Tekasu Mokuroku in 1624. Seventy pieces in total, committed to paper in a kind of accelerating archive. He also continued reading the Chinese classics, meditating, and — in a detail I find genuinely mysterious — studying military strategy, which he eventually wove into his thinking about music in ways that haven’t been fully untangled.
The last year of his life has a particular texture. In the spring of 1625, he left Kyoto to accept an invitation from one of his Patrons - Lord Hori Naogori, in Murakami. Some accounts suggest he prepared his affairs before leaving, with the careful deliberateness of someone who suspects they may not return. Whether that’s memory shaping narrative after the fact, or a true premonition, I can’t say. Either way: he never made it back. He died in Murakami on April 10, 1625, at fifty-six years old.
The school he founded survived him, carried forward by two disciples whose manuscripts have also reached us. But the broader current of history was already moving in the other direction. The Fuke shakuhachi, with its deeper tones and institutional backing — legally recognized as a Buddhist implement, restricted to the komusō — gradually absorbed the space that the hitoyogiri had occupied. By the nineteenth century, the little flute had gone quiet. By the early twentieth, it had all but vanished.
And yet here I am, playing it.
I find something clarifying about that fact, though I’m still not entirely sure what it means. Sokun spent most of his adult life working against exactly this kind of disappearance — copying by hand, teaching, commissioning flutes, writing treatises — and the instrument went quiet anyway, eventually. The silence lasted a long time. What he couldn’t have anticipated is that the manuscripts would survive, that someone would reopen them, that the practice would find its way back into a handful of hands scattered across a world he couldn’t have imagined.
I think about the notes he inscribed on the manuscript that became the Tanteki Hidenfu. The care of someone writing something down not because they’re sure it will last, but because they believe it deserves to.
That feels like enough to build from.
The surviving works attributed to Ōmori Sōkun include the Tanteki Hidenfu (1608), held at the Miyagi Michio Memorial Museum; the Sōsa-ryū Shakuhachi Tesu narabini Shoka Mokuroku (1622), preserved at the Tokyo University of the Arts; and the Shakuhachi Hiden-roku, Tekasu Mokuroku, and Sōden-shū (all 1624), held at various libraries including the Yōmei Bunko and the private Fushin’an Bunko. Flutes attributed to Sokun are held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and the Tokugawa Art Museum (Nagoya).