This paper examines the emergence and disappearance of Japan’s geisha kashu recording stars over the course of the 20th century, delving into their extensive body of audio recordings, which includes songs by some of Japan's most important early popular composers. Clarifying the distinction between geisha and the geisha recording stars, this paper traces the relationship between “traditional” Japanese musical forms (specifically, the complex of short shamisen songs long associated with geisha) and the popular genres that also comprised the geisha stars' repertoire. While historical audio media provide a valuable resource for scholars and fans alike, unconscious habits and unexamined discourses of listening may lead to the replication of orientalist and sexist stereotypes—and ultimately a superficial experience of the music. As a corrective to such tendencies in audience reception, this paper gives an overview of the key cultural and historical contexts of the geisha recording stars, including their contributions to the careers of several of well-respected composers. Attending to the sometimes difficult circumstances faced by geisha recording stars (and their geisha sisters) may rectify the image of these critically neglected women artists, ultimately providing a necessary counterpoint to the predominance of male musicians and male-centred musical genres in the Japanese canon.

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What do we hear in a human voice that vibrates through electrical flows? In this paper I argue for listening (and vocalizing) beyond the human in performances with audio media. I propose understanding such performance practice as engaging with what I call plasmatic voice, a phenomenon distinct from the merely additive, prosthetic conception of voice + electricity. Instead, plasmatic voice functions as instances of queer assemblage stretching to reach the radically Other that constitutes ourselves—facilitating the sense of what Alaimo (2010) terms transcorporeality, an understanding of human embodiment as “intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2). The vibrations of plasmatic voice—as an example of Eidsheim’s (2015) intermaterial vibrational practice—loosen (post)human social constructs of race and gender and reverberate with nonhuman ecosystems, as I illustrate through analysis of musical examples.

Graphic novels, by combining images with printed words, engage readers in narrative experiences comparable to the immersive quality of cinema. The rich tradition of manga, Japan's venerable and wide-ranging graphic narrative form, employs an array of graphical and linguistic strategies to engage readers, bodily as well as mentally and emotionally. Among these strategies, Japanese mimetics: a grammatical class of sound words, work effectively to transmit aural, tactile, and proprioceptive states. Yet most Japanese mimetics have no English equivalent and can only be expressed with phrase-length explanations or glosses; the somatic nature of mimetics thus resists translation. By grappling with the question of how to effectively express in English such translation-resistant linguistic forms, the author explores approaches to translation that attend to embodied and affective states such as those induced by mimetics. Experimental translational practices may thus attend to the affective and bodily-lived pressures felt when experiencing the in-between-ness of language(s). The structure of this paper accordingly follows the trajectory of a journey through (one reader's) translation and translational practice.