Doutor Prepúcio

My friend Shota builds banjos by hand in a tiny shop in Tokyo. He learned from an old man in the mountains of Virginia who had never taken an apprentice in his life. The first thing that old man ever said to him was "Go home." This is how it started. Most people don't know this, but Japan has a lot of bluegrass fans. Real ones. Banjos, fiddles, the whole thing. Shota fell in love with it at fifteen. In 2012, at 22, he flew to Virginia. He drove into a hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains, looking for a man named Clyde. Clyde was 74. He had been making banjos by hand for fifty years. No website. No phone listing. People found him by asking around. Shota stood in the doorway of the workshop and asked, in very bad English, if he could learn. Clyde looked at him for a long time. "Go home." Shota didn't go home. He slept in his rental car at the bottom of Clyde's driveway. Every morning at six, he walked up and swept the workshop floor. Clyde didn't stop him. Clyde didn't talk to him either. For three months, Shota was not allowed to touch a single piece of wood. But every morning, there was a hot biscuit wrapped in a paper towel sitting on the hood of his car. He assumed it was Clyde's wife, Mae. One day he thanked her. Mae looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice. "Honey, Clyde makes those. Don't you ever tell him I told you." In the fourth month, Clyde handed him a block of maple and a knife. Carve a neck. Shota carved it for two weeks. He was proud of it. Clyde looked at it for maybe five seconds. Then he opened the wood stove and threw it in. "Again." That was the lesson. That was the whole lesson. "Again." Shota carved forty necks. Clyde burned forty necks. The forty-first, Clyde turned over in his hands for a long time. Then he walked across the shop and set it on the shelf above his workbench. He didn't say anything. Shota told me that was the first time he cried in America. Clyde had one son. A good man, an accountant in Charlotte. They loved each other. He just never wanted the wood. Clyde had made his peace with it. When he was gone, the craft would go with him. Three generations, done. One night, a couple of years in, Shota finally asked him. Why did you let me stay? Clyde took a long time to answer. "1971. Bean Blossom, Indiana. Big bluegrass festival. A band of Japanese kids got up on that stage. Couldn't hardly speak English. Played like their lives depended on it." He shrugged. "And you came back every morning. Didn't matter where you came from. You came back." Shota stayed seven years. In the seventh year, he built his first banjo alone. Every piece. Clyde sat on his stool and played it for a very long time. Old songs. Slow ones. Then he handed it back and said one word. "Good." In seven years, Shota heard Clyde say that word one time. By 2019, Clyde's hands had gotten bad. He couldn't hold the tools anymore. One evening, he dragged an old wooden tool chest out from under the workbench and pushed it across the floor to Shota. Inside the lid, carved into the wood, were names. 1911. AMOS. 1946. WENDELL. 1972. CLYDE. His grandfather. His father. Himself. Then Clyde picked up a carving knife. His hands were shaking so badly it took him almost an hour. Underneath his own name, he carved one more. 2019. SHOTA. Shota said he couldn't breathe. He just sat on the workshop floor holding that lid. Clyde died the next spring. He was 82. Shota came home to Tokyo and opened his little shop. Every banjo he has ever built, inside the rim, where nobody will see it, he writes one small word. Clyde. This year, he got an order from Charlotte, North Carolina. A seventeen-year-old boy. He'd heard about a guy in Tokyo who builds banjos the old Virginia way. The boy's last name was the same as Clyde's. It was his grandson. Next summer, that boy is flying to Tokyo. To learn. Clyde thought the craft would die with him. It just went the long way around.