I’ve returned again and again over the years, but the sound-soaked memories of my first time never get old. Tokyo was an echoing palace full of unfamiliar melodies, tunes, words, noises I wouldn’t call ‘music’ until years later, and the exotic shrieks and bangs of noh. In particular the nohkan flute, whose wild voice can, so they say, rip open pathways between worlds. From a flat in Finsbury Park all the way to Japan, I followed those sounds. From one world, to another.

At first I couldn’t say much and I was illiterate. Words were everywhere, mocking me: splurging out of shops, TV info-mercials, pop songs piped onto huge outdoor screens, department stores flanked by flashing logos playing slogan songs, layered one on top of another. To survive, I found myself following the shape of phrases - not as words, but as tunes. If you can sing a thing, I thought, can it get you closer to knowing it, owning it? What gave me hope was I’d just started learning the nohkan. I loved its wild, harmonically unwieldy sound - but even better I loved shōga, its notation system. Hya , hyo, hi, hyu, ho, ra, ro, ri - not notes but syllables, combinations of which represent phrases not pitches. You learn to sing them first and even though the intervals and notes are different, when you pick up the nohkan and play the ‘same’ phrase, somehow it makes sense. Sung shōga can, if necessary, stand in for the actual instrument even in performance. So, if you can sing something, then maybe you DO know it. So perhaps I could create my own shōga, to understand this new place, and my place inside it?

All through the year I lived in Tokyo, on the last Sunday of the month, I’d journey pilgrim-like from my shonky Shimokitazawa sharehouse, by foot and two trains, to the Kita Roppeita Memorial Noh Theater in Meguro, to see noh. That’s why I was here after all - called by the nohkan’s world-traversing scream and the howling kakegoe of taiko and tsuzumi drummers’ voices, to stories of masked ghosts declaiming medieval poetry. Friends - expat and Japanese - thought I was mad.

‘Noh?’ they said, it’s so ‘old hat’, it’s only there for grannies to fall asleep to’.

I knew better. Noh - the most venerable theatrical tradition in the world! Striking sounds as alien as you could get without leaving the planet! Woven kimonos 5 layers deep. Chant-timbres low and dark as fresh earth. More serious than bunraku, less camp than kabuki. Super Duper Japanese!

It’s mid-morning. Sharehouse: silent, housemates not long back from their favourite nightclubs. As I set out, my street is quiet too. So quiet I can hear the crows ripping into people’s newly put-out bins. How to hear it? Japanese has tons of brilliant sound words. I’m jealous. There are far fewer in English.

My street: So quiet I can hear the crows ripping into people’s newly put-out bins Flutter
/rustle/flap/WAAR! like they do every week, munching tasty bits clack/rrrip/WAAR!.

When they’re done, they take off WAAAR /flap/pnah! leaving the kind of mess I’d expect on any bin day London street, but which seems shocking here.

In Tokyo, the Crows are kings: they make London crows sound timorous and shy. I’d like to stay and imagine what this beefy Tokyo lot might be saying but I don’t linger like I sometimes do. I’ve got noh to go to. 

Ding! Local convenience store doors open, almost-but-not-quite in harmony with the sales assistant’s’ chirpy welcome "irasshaimase!"

The shop sound system plays a jingle, sung by an enthusiastic female voice in what I know now, but didn’t then, is super polite ‘customer service’ Japanese. I grab a bento lunch in crackling plastic, and go to pay. BaChing! kaTA! The till opens and closes. A white carrier-bag rustles open ready for my purchase. Snick, a fresh-cut bit of branded sellotape seals the bag shut. My change clatters onto a waiting plastic plate, for me to collect without touching hands.

Ding! Door open, Door Shut. Five more minutes’ walk and I’m outside Shimokitazawa station - West Exit connected to East by a highwalk blurting out muzak at unexpected intervals, piped over from the supermarket below. Dang! Dang! Dang! One of many nearby level crossings is closing, or opening. They do that all day long around here. Until about 2015, level crossing dangs were as much a part of the soundscape as the tiny-venue live music this area got famous for. Now, only the venues struggle on. The train lines both went, like forgotten music, Underground.

Here’s a coping mechanism. Follow your ears. Turn what comes in, into patterns. Sounds are notes. You can sing them. Sing them till they make sense. Life, translated into shōga. Simple as that. You hope.

‘Ashimoto ni gochooikudasai!’ Mind the gap please. KSSS! ‘Doa ga shimarimasu.’ Mind the closing doors.

From Shimokitazawa it’s two stops to ‘Shibuyaaa; Shibuyaaa - shuuten dess!’
This train terminates here. But I’m still on my way.

Shibuya. Busiest station in Tokyo: vaulted ceilings, glass walkways, long escalators zigzagging up and down, neatly people-packed. Six months living here and I’m still surprised by how recorded sound drowns out human voices in public spaces like this. Nothing like Victoria or Paddington or St Pancras. Doors ding, kiosks sing, tannoys play complicated modulating jingles that earworm you but which you can’t hum.

The JR Yamanote line encircles central Tokyo. Shibuya-Ebisu-Meguro: from Meguro to noh. I reach the platform just in time. KSSS!

‘Mamonaku, densha ga mairimasu!’ Voiceover - bossy man, on this line - tells me the train’s arriving just after it arrives. ‘Gojorsha, arigato gozaimasu!’ Welcome aboard. KSSS!

I’m in. The train’s hydraulic hum crescendoes as it speeds up, quietens as it slows back down. ‘Meguro eki ni touchaku shimasu.’ I’m here! KSSS! Exit gates takatak me through into a department store food hall - a chorus of high-pitched welcomes and offers of sweets, baked goods, 50 kinds of pickles: ‘irrashaimase! Ikagadesuka?!?!’

Out, across a beeping, tweeting zebra crossing, past a posh chinese restaurant, there’s a long~ straight road. It leads to the Kita Roppeita Memorial noh theater. Lined with art school buildings and offices shut for the weekend. No cars, no jingles, no beeps no dings, no muzak, no voices. That road’s hush is my portal to another sound-Tokyo: somewhere almost make believe to most people I know, but as real to me, these longed-for Sundays, as the one my ears took me through to get here.

The quiet continues inside. Thick carpet hushes footsteps, voices no more than a low one-note buzz. No enthusiastic piped announcements here: everyone knows what to do. You take your seat. Then, from offstage, fuuuuu! three blasts of nohkan float out, shrill enough to command hush. Pyon! - the kotsuzumi shoulder drum kicks in. Clock! - otsuzumi hip drum. Together they play Oshirabe: part tune-up, part offstage overture. The same - and not the same - every time. All the performers, and half the audience, could easily sing each instrument’s shōga. It starts ...

Nohkan: HO HO HO 
Kotsuzumi: po po po po po po
Otsuzumi: TCHON 
… and continues 

and knowing how it goes makes it more special. The end of oshirabe marks the beginning of the noh. By now we’re all silent: mystery crackles in the air along with the odd rogue sweet-wrapper. The polished wooden stage, a perfect square perfectly empty, waits under its own roof, between its own four pillars. A small wooden door upstage left slides open. The jiutai chorus - eight kimono-clad men - file in and sit, in two lines, along the right hand side of the square. Upstage right, the three hayashi musicians file down the hashigakari bridgeway and sit along the back of the square. After a rustling of sleeves and hakama as they all settle into position, silence returns. And then, out of the silence - it begins.

– Laura Sampson