When Aoba was 18, she moved from her hometown, Kyoto, to Tokyo in pursuit of her first and only musical educator, eight-string guitar luminary Anmi Yamada. As a young girl, she’d tried piano lessons but dropped out after two weeks, uncomfortable with learning an instrument in a group setting. Instead, she taught herself guitar.

Learning from Yamada was different. By the time her apprenticeship began, she’d already learned most of his songs by attending every concert he played in Kyoto during her mid-teens, inhaling his catalog until it became part of her every breath, and transposing his notes from from eight-string to six — no easy task for a guitarist with no formal training.

This practice remained, in some ways, unchanged when Yamada started giving her lessons in person. “Mostly, I’d just watch and learn,” she says. “Sometimes he gave me homework, saying, ‘Listen to this CD all day and feel the difference it makes at the end of the day, how you play before and after you listen, observing how you change as a guitar player.’”

Singing came less naturally, but she developed a method for overcoming her initial shyness: “When I debuted, I’d already separated from Anmi, but whenever I’m singing, I always remind myself of the joy when I was studying with him,” she says. “That’s what drives me to sing. I’m not really the kind of artist who says, ‘Please listen to my singing voice,’ but I want to keep that memory alive.”

Through Yamada, Aoba found Belgian-French Manouche and Sinti jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt’s Djangology ; it revolutionized her playing style the moment she laid ears on it. A copy of the CD sits on our Williamsburg conference table, and as she waits for her interpreter to relay her words to me, she carefully picks the spokes from the center of the disc’s jewel case, laying them out in a neat line. When she finishes, she begins to doodle in a notebook — first a whale; then, above it, a luminescent creature.