The premise
The tradition's musical instruments are all tsukumogami — but their grievances are not the usual disposal-grudge. Each remembers something specific about music as an institution, and together they form the tradition's own music-history department, with ghosts for faculty.
The string section (Sekien's seated trio)
The Muromachi emaki already marched a koto-yokai dragged along by a biwa-yokai — "the string section marching together for three centuries before Sekien seated them":
- Koto-furunushi: the wing's most specific grievance — since Yatsuhashi Kengyō's reforms, the old Tsukushi-goto style survives "in name only," so the instrument rose "to make its resentment known." Not a neglected object: a neglected repertoire. A music-history footnote, risen.
- Biwa-bokuboku: named for Bokuba, the legendary biwa of the Tsurezuregusa, paired in lore with Genjō — the palace biwa a demon stole (the Kinpishō carries both). The instrument-as-celebrity: famous biwa had reputations for the supernatural before Sekien gave one a body and a cane.
- Shamichōrō: the abandoned master's shamisen, its name punning shami (novice monk) into elder — seniority-transformation as a monastic career; Sekien's moral per the JA record: "undeserving practitioners shouldn't claim mastery."
The ritual percussion
Suzuhikohime: the kagura bells awakened, remembering — by Sekien's own dreaming-heart caption — Ame-no-Uzume's dance at the rock door: the tradition's founding performance, cited by its instrument. With the scholarship's dry footnote (Uzume used no bells; the memory is institutional, not literal) displayed as the methods-lesson it is.
The performers
The wing's human faculty are the blind professionals: the ōzatō walking to the quarter with his shamisen (and his ledger), the umi-zatō walking the sea itself, the itako mediums playing the gods at the Oshira rites — and Hōichi, the biwa-priest summoned to perform the Heike's fall to the Heike [hearn-1904]. In these stories, music at the highest level is the blind guild's monopoly, and the repertoire's best audience is the dead.
The stage crew (added 2026-07-29)
The wing had a technical department and nobody has credited it. San'yūtei Enchō (1839–1900), the rakugo master who made the ghost story a solo art, introduced background instrumentation and altered stage lighting for his kaidan performances — "a trend which would become standard today." Read that plainly: mood lighting was invented for yokai. The darkened room, the sound under the voice, the withheld reveal — these are not cinema's contributions to horror, they are a storyteller's, patented in a Meiji parlor and inherited by everything since. His Botan Dōrō and Kasane-ga-fuchi set the modern shape of both tales; J-horror's slow, starved pacing is arguably his stage timing, filmed. Which puts the music wing in an odd position on this site: it is the only cluster whose members are haunted by music, and whose one living human turned the haunting into a production standard.
The unaccompanied sound
Not every noise in this wing has an instrument behind it, and the worst one doesn't. In Tosa, the warai-onna appears on the 1st, 9th, and 17th of the month, points, and laughs — and the laugh recruits: "stones, plants, water, and wind seemed to laugh together." What makes it the wing's outer wall is the mechanism. Every instrument here is a soloist with a grievance. Her laugh is not a sound but a consensus — the terror is that the world agrees with her, and the human party becomes the only thing on the mountain not laughing. Exclusion, performed by an ecosystem. The file's variants complete the range: nocturnal, voiceless, and the one where the victim laughs until fever — the weapon migrating from her mouth into yours.
Every member remembers a loss internal to music: a style reformed away (koto), a famous instrument stolen (biwa), a master gone (shamisen), a founding performance receding into institutional memory (bells), an audience that won't stop requesting the one song about itself (Hōichi). The wing's thesis: the tradition understood repertoire as a living thing that can die — and gave its remains the same afterlife as people. The grief-index has a workers' shelf; this is the musicians' local.