Magic and myth: from Westmeath to Japan

Twenty twenty five was a busy year for Westmeath musician Charles Marshall. In July, he featured in the pages of the Westmeath Examiner as he coordinated the Tullamore International Organ Series. In and around that time he created and performed, in conjunction with his sister, a unique piece reflecting an aspect of his intriguing musical development.

It was a meditation on an intertwined history between Japan and Ireland. In it Triona Marshall, with her brother Charles, not only created a piece that links two countries on opposite sides of the globe, but brought it to life.

The piece features Triona playing the Irish harp, while Charles utilises the Satsuma biwa and performs traditional Japanese singing.

Triona’s musical career has seen her work with notable artists like with The Chieftains, Ricky Skaggs, and Bela Fleck.

Charles received his early musical training in piano and flute, commencing his organ studies at St Finian’s College, Mullingar with Shane Brennan.

In 1994, he travelled to Japan focusing on the study of Japanese traditional music. In 1999, he received the biwa title Ranjo.

The talented brother and sister duo were commissioned to create a musical piece to coincide with the exhibition ‘Kwaidan – Encounters with Lafcadio Hearn’ at Farmleigh House, Dublin in March 2025.

Last July Charles played in the new Irish Embassy in Tokyo for the presentation of the Seamus Heaney Prize to poet Sinéad Morissey in July.

As a duo, they played the Lafcadio programme on Halloween night at the embassy for the opening of the Kwaidan exhibition of art works by Japanese and Irish artists.

That cross-cultural performance was a musical retelling of Lafcadio Hearn’s most renowned ghost story, Miminashi Hoichi.

Hearn is a significant figure in Japanese literature, both for his catalogue of traditional ghost stories and fairy tales as well as his observations of the Japanese way of life.

He was born in 1850 in Greece, the son of an Irish father and of a Greek mother.

The programme for the opening of the exhibition at the new Irish Embassy in Tokyo was based on a piece commissioned by Professor Nathan Hill and Dr Lijing Peng of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, Trinity College Dublin.

That was a performance shaped around Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, a collection of Japanese ghost stories originally published in 1904: “Last March there was the opening of an exhibition in relation to Kwaidan.

“In conjunction with that there was also a colloquium in Trinity College organised by the Centre for Asian Studies.

Both places asked us separately if we would do something to coincide with the two events,” Charles said of the origins of the piece they performed.

It was not the first time they combined their musical talents: “A long time ago we did one piece together called Kadobiwa, it means ‘biwa of the gate’.

That was an interpretation of music played by a blind priests, who would go around to houses in the parish and play it at the gates.”

Triona explained how the piece had an extended gestation period:

“We hadn’t done it in nearly 20 years, so we decided to start again. It was originally three minutes long, so we had to expand it to 40 minutes.”

For Charlie there is a delightful link between the tale and the music: “It’s a musical story based on the first of a set of ghost stories called Miminashi Hoichi, or Earless Hoichi.

It describes a young priest who is proficient on the biwa, but he’s blind. He’s playing at a temple he is visiting when a warrior comes and demands that he go and play for his lord.

“Delighted at the possibility of patronage, he heads off and plays for him.

That continues for a number of nights. Finally the priest who runs the temple realises that Hoichi is heading out every night. He finds out Hoichi’s actually going to a graveyard to play where all of the warriors had been laid to rest.”

The intercultural creation then expanded beyond its origins: “We created a musical narrative around that which became the foundation of our programme.

We played that in March, then we played it in a small church Calary, County Wicklow. Then we took it to Japan.”

How to take the piece across to the other side of the world was the next step: “I approached Aisling Braden, the cultural attaché in the Irish embassy in Tokyo, in April.

She suggested that we approach Culture Ireland about sponsorship. That covered our travel costs, so we were able to go over and perform it in Japan.”

Turning the Lafcadio Hearn story into a performance piece was a challenge Triona enjoyed:

“I think if you have the right music, something that has the right feel and the right atmosphere, then it’s possible to marry some strange, distinctively different sounds together.

“I knew some music I thought would work really well with the sound of biwa. Once we started putting them together, it just worked. There’s a lot that wouldn’t work, but when you find the right stuff it works really well,” she said.

Triona’s Irish harp and Charles’s Satsuma biwa are as much cultural symbols as they are musical instruments. The Japanese short-necked wooden lute is traditionally used in narrative storytelling: “It was developed in the first half of the 16th century in the southernmost province in Japan,” Charles said. “It’s called Kagoshima today but it was called Satsuma at that time, as in Satsuma orange.

“The instrument was created for warriors. After a period of civil war and immense strife it was meant to restore people after the trauma of battle, the trauma of killing one’s own brother in some cases.”

Charles’s time spent studying Japanese traditional music gave him a deep understanding of its cultural significance: “I play the instrument as it was played originally. I was lucky to meet a teacher who taught it that way.

“The biwa had a chequered history in the 20th century, what with the militarism associated with the Second World War. It became associated with all of that. There’s been an attempt to rehabilitate it and to give it back its original meaning as opposed to one that’s associated with militarism.”

Creating a piece of music that brings together two diverse cultures is not easy: “Putting the two instruments together was a big challenge. My sister was always coming up with new ideas.

“Trying to realise them was difficult, but the most difficult thing was trying to memorise what we did before, because everything was improvised to a degree.”

Performing in Japan was the culmination of the creative process: “Our most recent trip was about three weeks. We did 10 concerts, beginning in the region where the instrument came from. It was a bit like a visit to Mecca for me,” Charles said.

Triona was aware of what it meant for her brother: “Charlie went to a shrine and met a priest who had a biwa that belonged to Saigo Takamori, a Japanese samurai and politician who was one of the most influential figures in Japanese history.

“The movie The Last Samurai is roughly based around him. They had an instrument that was played on the night he died in battle, so they brought it out for Charles to play. That is in the middle of an electric storm, so there was lightning flying around outside and Charles was playing the biwa. It was very exciting.”

Marrying Japanese and Irish sounds to evoke the story presented in the music is the essence of what they created: “I think for the Kadobua in particular, it’s very Japanese,” Triona said.

“In my role, I’m creating the scenery around the sound, around the main personality, if that makes sense.

It’s like somebody standing in the scenery or moving through a space. It’s very much an accompaniment or filling out. I don’t try to push any Irishness into it.”

In October and November 2025, a Japanese production company, supported by Culture Ireland, facilitated the tour with performances in venues in Kagoshima, Kyoto, Chiba and Tokyo. Each venue was selected for its atmosphere to evoke the spirit of Hearn’s world and engage local communities through accessible public performances.

An Earth Voice Project recording of the performance is being edited for an online broadcast, and the March 7 recitation of Kwaidan – Encounters with Lafcadio Hearn can be viewed online.