2024-08-03 03:53:46
Everything in life happens only a few times and death is long on the way. “How many more times will you look at the rising of the full moon? Maybe twenty times. And yet it all seems inexhaustible,” thought the hero of the novel Under the Protection of Heaven by the writer Paul Bowles. “I recently turned seventy. How many more times will I look at the full moon rising?” paraphrased Oscar-winning musician Ryūichi Sakamoto.
Nine times. Since June 2022, when he wrote it in his diary, Japanese composer and pianist Ryūichi Sakamoto has seen nine full moons before he died of cancer last year at the age of 71. He was obsessed with thought. The novel, for which he composed the music for the film adaptation by director Bernardo Bertolucci, he owned in four languages, underlining a passage in each. Spoken directly by Bowles, he incorporated it into the composition. He also called his second autobiography How many more times will I look at the rising of the full moon.
The idea is also strongly present in Rjúiči Sakamoto’s film: Opus, which Czechs saw twice this month. First at the Karlovy Vary festival, whose artistic director Karel Och subsequently presented it at Colors of Ostrava.
“In September 2022, master Ryūichi Sakamoto sat down at the piano for the last time in Tokyo to record a one-hundred-minute session composed of twenty pieces spanning his entire roughly fifty-year career. He knew that the end of his life was approaching, and directed by his son Neo Sora, he created this testament,” said Och in Ostrava. He compared the film to a private requiem. “To call it a concert studio film would be criminally simplistic. What it offers is infinitely more complex,” he added.
And really. The seemingly straightforward documentary, composed entirely of black-and-white footage of the composer playing his best-known compositions, has a massive reach. Leonard Cohen and David Bowie recently sent a similarly powerful posthumous message in music. At the same time, the film closes a musical career that began far from an ordinary piano.
Just a few minutes
Ryūichi Sakamoto first drew attention to himself in the late 1970s, when this Tokyo University composition graduate began playing electronic music on keyboards in the band Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Japanese equivalent of Germany’s Kraftwerk. Among other things, he used the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, popular with Peter Gabriel and the Czech exile Jan Hammer. It was on it that Sakamoto constructed his biggest hit, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence for the film of the same name about a Japanese prison camp, in which he acted alongside David Bowie. The harmony was based on the piano piece Clair de lune by Claude Debussy, but he deliberately chose an oriental melody, as it was Asian music that influenced Debussy, the author explained.
Ryūichi Sakamoto kept a diary for the last few years. | Photo: Janus Films
Not long after, the group broke up and he began a solo career. When he moved to New York in the 1990s, he was already a sought-after soundtrack author. The epic film The Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolucci won him an Oscar, a Grammy and a Golden Globe, and he also worked for directors Brian De Palma and Alejandro González Iñárritu. He made a career in the West like few other Japanese musicians: Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys or Robbie Robertson from The Band were guests on his solo records. He composed the music for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games, performed in a music video by Madonna.
Sakamoto captured the times by mixing Eastern and Western popular music. And he may have overtaken her by erasing genres: the simple tune Energy Flow, with which he dominated the Japanese charts, was originally invented for a drug advertisement. In addition to films, he composed soundtracks for computer games, ringtones for Nokia mobile phones or the ringtone for the Sega Dreamcast game console. He also once sent an e-mail to the chef of the New York restaurant Kadžica. “I love your food, I respect you, and I really like your place, I just can’t stand the music,” Sakamoto complained. It ended up with the Oscar winner creating a multi-hour playlist for the restaurant, available today on Spotify.
Since 2008, when he recorded the sound of a melting glacier in Greenland, Rjúiči Sakamoto has also been politically engaged. “I’m fascinated by the melting of snow from pre-industrial times when the Earth was healthier,” he explained, explaining why he warns about climate change and protests against nuclear power.
In the 2017 documentary Coda, he plays the piano washed away by the tsunami that damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant. “Of course he was out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. Nature tuned him up,” he said. At that time, in his music – for example, the soundtrack to the film Revenant Resurrection with actor Leonardo DiCaprio – piano, electronics and strings were complemented by ambient noises such as raindrops.
Sakamoto’s increased attention to the sounds surrounding him was related to his health condition. He was treated for cancer for the first time in 2014. “I want to use the time I have left as meaningfully as possible. So that I don’t have to be ashamed of the music I leave behind,” he declared. He recalled how he came up with the melody for the movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in just thirty seconds. “So even a minute or two of extra life can be enough to make me think of something,” he argued.
He also claimed that the older he gets, the slower he plays his works. “I want to hear the sound resonate. I like to play fewer notes and leave more space between them,” he said.
In 2020, his cancer returned. After several decades, he moved back to Tokyo. There, during treatment, he completed the last album, on which miniatures named after the passing of time accompany the sound of his breathing or the closing of the piano lid. He streamed several farewell concerts from behind it at the end of 2022. One such is captured by Ryūichi Sakamoto’s documentary: Opus. It was filmed by the musician’s son Neo Sora.
The film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus is not yet available on streaming platforms. | Video: Janus Films
Like in the forest
It is no longer an ordinary concert film because there is no audience. Wearing a black shirt and jacket, round-rimmed glasses, and white hair parted in the middle, Sakamoto sits hunched over a Yamaha fender alone in a Tokyo radio studio. He doesn’t talk to the camera, he doesn’t introduce songs, he just plays. In the arrangement for solo piano, some straightforward melodies are reminiscent of Erik Satie, for example the title Opus from 1999 with its effective modulations. Andata’s economical composition, on the other hand, uses Bachian counterpoint.
Pianissimo predominates. Sakamoto goes all the way back to the beginning of his career: the song Tong Poo is slowed down in the acoustic version compared to how he played it on the synthesizer in Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978. The melody from the computer game Lack of Love is stripped of keyboards and artificial strings. He experiments with a prepared piano and places screws in the mechanics of the instrument so that the hammer rings when it hits the strings. And it’s not just about music.
At one point, we see the musician gathering his strength with his head resting on his hand. In an improvised part of Bibo no Aozora, used in the 2006 film Babel, he gets stuck on one chord. “Of course, he played him flawlessly the second time around. But we intentionally left an imperfect version in the film. It seemed to me that he had something extra. As if he was walking through the forest and looking for a non-existent path,” compared the director.
Apart from the piano, we can hear more and more clearly how Sakamoto breathes, presses the pedal of the instrument, rustles the music paper. It is as if the documentary transfers the emphasis from the piano to the body that sounds it.
Shots of black and white keyboards are complemented by an impressive play of light and shadow on the floor or walls, as well as details of the face and hands. It couldn’t be more intimate. The son films the father: the veins on his hands, his clean-shaven face, his eyes fixed on the score, none of that will be there soon. Ryūichi Sakamoto lets those hands hang meaningfully in the air several times, as if reminding himself that even things he’s played a thousand times, he sometimes had to interpret for the last time.
He saves the best for last. When the imitation Christmas bells from Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence are heard, the viewer knows that the end is near: the concert, the work, the life. Lastly, the enlightenment changes slightly. At the beginning of the film, the insignificant lamp next to the instrument is now captured by the camera as if it were the full moon that rose over the composer’s head for the last time.
Towards the end, the camera cuts to Ryuichi Sakamoto as if a full moon had risen above his head. | Photo: Janus Films
In the diary he kept at the end of his life, Ryūichi Sakamoto described what it was like to do things for the last time. Once again he went to the restaurant for his favorite sushi. And at the beginning of last March, he said goodbye to the doctors. “I think this concludes the treatment. Thank you very much,” he shook their hands. He died three days later.
And the full moon? In the novel Under the Protection of the Sky, he all the time illuminates the existential crisis of spouses who are alienated from each other. But one day, somewhere between Algeria and Morocco, they rent bikes and ride to a mountain ridge, from where they watch the sunset. Below, an endless flat desert, an immeasurable space broken here and there by arches of rocks and bathed in red. “The sky is very strange here. When I look at it, I feel like it’s something solid overhead and it protects us from what’s still ahead,” he muses. “Further? What’s further?” – “Nothing in my opinion. Just darkness. Absolute night.”
Film
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus
Directed by: Neo Sora
The film was presented by the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and Colors of Ostrava.