Japanese Folk Songs Collection: 24 Traditional Folk Songs for Intermediate Level Piano Solo Paperback – December 1, 2013

This is a start if you want the folk music of Japan. The arranger of the 'harmony' does not overwhelm the melody. I hope more books come out like this, even it is only the Koto melodies, written in staff notation.

Not really intermediate -- very easy. Simple, beautiful arrangements.

I am totally disappointed with this song book. I waited a long time to receive it, had to pay $6.00 in postage and then when it finally came, there were no lyrics to the songs! The author is a Japanese woman - she could have at least put the words to the songs, which is what I was searching for. It only has notes to the songs - very misleading.

I bought this book to have Western sheet music for practicing shakuhachi and other flutes. I knew that the book was written for piano, and so the range of notes might be outside of what is playable on a flute without transposing, and that most songs might be unplayable on the shakuhachi without half or three-quarter holing. With that said, I was initially a little reserved about this book because just playing the melody lines didn't do much for me (and I have no real sense of Asian music). But all this changed when I realized that the author had given the names of the songs in Japanese characters, transliterated into English, and translated into English. With that information, I was able to find online performances of all of the pieces, and that has been phenomenally helpful because I now know what they can sound like. Also, many of the pieces are directly playable on my flutes and even the shakuhachi, so this book has turned out to be perfect for my purposes. Just know that if you are going to search for online videos of the songs, you may have to play with the spelling: the book's "Ahmé," for example, is better searched as "ame ame," and "Hahna ichi monmé" was found as "Hanaichimonme." Of course, if you speak Japanese and/or play piano, this book will be even better for you. If it had been Western notation for the shakuhachi, I would have given it five stars - or if it had come with a CD of the tunes being sung and played.