Some musicians have given so many unforgettable melodies that they seem, all our lives, to have surrounded us, made them live in them even more than accompanied. Ryuichi Sakamoto was a universe even more than a star, whose influence on music is unquantifiable. A melody, of course, floats in the foam of its legacy: that of the theme of Furyo (1983), great film by Nagisa Oshima in which Sakamoto, actor for the first time, shared the poster with David Bowie. However, it is enough to begin a summary deconstruction of it to measure the extent of what the musician had put into it, Japanese and post-romantic traditions, electronic pop, Western orientalism and Eastern reveries of the West… A whole world of worlds in motion, of which he was a great computer and, quite rightly, the undisputed maestro, a monument in his country, Japan, and the most famous Japanese musician anywhere else.
And then, floating between the joints of this skilful construction, his own melancholy, that of a Tokyo child born after the war, thrown into the bath of the revolution at the end of the 1960s, of which he was a part at the same time while he was learning the craft of a composer. He never ceased to worry about the life of his country, from the heights of the economic bubble to the tragedy of Fukushima. Activist and humanist, emancipated from the follies of the star system, Ryuichi Sakamoto was also a political voice, in his own way, falsely hushed but of infinite power, intransigent on democratic excesses, on nuclear power, of which he was a bitter critic. A few weeks ago, an open letter sent to the governor of Tokyo called on her to abandon a project to renovate two stadiums in the Shinjuku district, which was to lead to the uprooting of hundreds of trees. “We should not sacrifice precious trees that our ancestors spent a hundred years protecting and nurturing for short-term economic gain.”