Ryuichi Sakamoto: After the finale

▲Ryuichi Sakamoto

"Debussy Reincarnated"

Ryuichi Sakamoto salvage the sound. "I'm fishing the sound." Inside the Arctic Circle, he squatted on the ice sheet with a smile, carefully hanging the recording device from a rope and sinking it into the flowing water under the crack, which was accelerated by global warming. He said it was the purest sound he had ever heard.

In the footage captured in the documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto is often collecting sounds: in a city house, he listens to the sound of rain hitting different objects - rubber buckets on his head; In the forest, he held up a small stick and beat on all things, collecting the echoes of these sounds through the woods and the wind; Back at home in New York's West Village, he began playing the piano and composing music to the playback of natural sounds.

Coda, a musical term, refers to the passage in which the final passage of the movement emphasizes the ending effect. On December 16, the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto, which bears his name, finally appeared on the big screen of some Chinese cinemas two years after it was released at the Venice Film Festival in 2017, and the Chinese translation is called "Ryuichi Sakamoto: The Finale". Starting with Ryuichi Sakamoto's 2012 charity performance for the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, the documentary captures his five-year musical journey and the production of his new album, Async.

Two days before the release, Ryuichi Sakamoto specially opened Weibo to share a video of Chinese introducing himself, musician Zhang Yadong and actor Li now warmly expressed their welcome on Weibo, and the more than 30,000 retweets of this Weibo may serve as a footnote to Sakamoto's popularity in China.

67-year-old pianist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who is world-famous for his film music, won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Original Score for the film soundtrack of The Last Emperor. Ryuichi Sakamoto's music has undergone several stylistic shifts, so that his audience includes not only fans of electronic music but also fans of classical music. In the '80s, he also appeared as an actor in the nine-Oscar winning film The Last Emperor and the Palme d'Or winning film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – although his self-assessment of his brief experience as an actor was "hanging".

"I couldn't believe that I had cancer." In the documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto has gray-silver hair and a pair of gentle and somewhat tired eyes under the tortoise-print frame. Then he smiled a little puzzled and incredulous and said, "It feels like a joke." ”

▲ Ryuichi Sakamoto (left), David Byrne (middle), and Su Cong (right) at the 1988 Oscars

When a lump appeared on the left side of his neck in 2014, 62-year-old Ryuichi Sakamoto thought it was a sign of aging. Upon examination, he was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer. When he announced the news on his website, his tone was a little depressed and puzzled - after all, he has paid extra attention to his health since he was 40 years old and has always strictly adhered to a healthy diet. A year after his diagnosis, Ryuichi Sakamoto underwent radiation therapy and rehabilitation, and his personal album was scrapped, and he turned down all job requests, with the exception of producing music for Alejandro Inaritu's 2015 film The Revenant, which was later nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

"I don't know how many years I will live, maybe 20 years, maybe 10 years, maybe only a year." A heart is carried. Ryuichi Sakamoto said that in order not to leave regrets, he wanted to create more works that he could use.

Since the 80s, Ryuichi Sakamoto has been one of the most popular Japanese musicians in the West, and there is also a large fan base in East Asia. Initially, he was a founding member of the synth-pop pioneer YMO band. In October 1979, YMO, which had just released his second album, began a world tour, and thus entered the period of global fame, and Michael Jackson covered his songs.

At that time, the YMO band was once regarded as a representative of Japan's cultural export, which made Sakamoto feel the weight of carrying the expectations of the country. He felt unwell and chose to avoid it, even thinking about the experience of the Japanese writer Soseki Natsume, who returned to China after spending about two years of depression as a representative of the country sent to London to learn English. Drawing on himself by the highly respected Mr. Natsume, Sakamoto was a little ashamed: "It's too much to compare himself to Natsume Soseki. ”

"For a while, I even kind of really believed that I was the reincarnation of Debussy." Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote in his 2017 autobiography, Music is Freedom. After learning classical music since he was a child, he came into contact with Debussy's music in junior high school, and once became too fascinated that he gradually thought that he was the reincarnation of Debussy, a French composer who lived in the early 20th century, and even thought: Why do you live in such a place? Why do you speak Japanese? He often practiced Debussy's signature "Claude Debussy" in his notebook.

However, Ryuichi Sakamoto's most notable work was his compositions in the films "The Last Emperor" and "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", in which East Asian melodies live in harmony with Western instruments, creating a sad and passionate atmosphere for the film, and were appreciated by both East Asia and the West. Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is reminiscent of the Orientalism of Debussy's music, but he conceived it in the opposite direction and often made pop music.

The history of Western music intertwines with Ryuichi Sakamoto's personal career. In elementary school, he became fascinated by Bach, and then fell in love with Beethoven, Debussy, and so-called modern music, which made him feel like listening to Western music along the way. Towards the end of the 60s of the 20th century, he gradually fell in love with the music of the same era as him, such as The Beatles.

"It also means that I can agree with the problems that these musicians feel." He wrote.

Deconstruction

In 1986, the film "The Last Emperor" began filming. Ryuichi Sakamoto plays Masahiko Gansu, the head of the police department of the puppet Manchurian Ministry of Civil Affairs. On the day he arrived at the filming set, he met Zun Long, who played Puyi, for the first time, when the other actors had been filming for three months and fully committed to the role. Zun Long said to him: "You are the black hand behind the scenes sent by Japan, you are my enemy, the film is not finished, I will not talk to you." ”

"I went with the mood of a hanger, so I was startled by his words and wondered what was going on with this person." Sakamoto later recalled that he was still laughing and flirtatious. An important scene in Ganji is to say to Puyi: "You are just a puppet, our Japanese doll." Before filming began, director Bernardo Bertolucci came to warn him: "If you want to shoot this scene in a week, you are not allowed to laugh until then, think about Amaterasu." ”

However, there is a scene in the script that Sakamoto cannot accept, that is, Masahiko Gansu, who died of poison, died of seppuku in the play. Sakamoto was disgusted by the plot setting of seppuku and desperately persuaded the director, finally saying: "Do you want to choose seppuku ? Or do you want to choose me? If I want to leave the seppuku plot, I will go back to Japan immediately. This made Bertolucci break his head, and finally changed the plot to Gansu and raised a gun to commit suicide. And because of the plot, Sakamoto needs to roar out the line "Asia belong to us". "Even though it's acting, it's quite difficult to say such lines." He recalled that the director kept shouting "click" and he kept yelling this sentence. 

For Sakamoto, the special feature of this film shooting is that it takes him back to his father's experience of war. The crew traveled to Beijing, Dalian, and Changchun to shoot, filming the content of Japan's invasion of China at the beginning of the last century, and when filming in Beijing, it rented the real Forbidden City, and after moving to Changchun, it borrowed the palace where the puppet Manchukuo emperor actually lived, and Dalian was also where his father briefly stationed during the mobilization of student soldiers.

Ryuichi Sakamoto's father, Kazukame Sakamoto, was a literary editor who worked with many writers such as Hiroshi Noma and Kazumi Takahashi, and was relatively free-minded, but because he was called to fight, he developed some deep-rooted habits in the army, such as yelling at his family in the usual tone of ordering soldiers, "Bring me the newspaper!" Sakamoto, who was terrified of this, did not take the initiative to talk to his father, and if his father wanted to tell him something, he also relayed it through his mother. However, "I obviously did not dare to say a word in front of my father, but because I was too excited, I pulled him to the stereo and played the Beatles record for him." ”

The first time in my life that I realized that I loved music and actively thought about what I really wanted to do, I was in junior high school. After entering junior high school, Ryuichi Sakamoto once gave up music because he joined the popular basketball team. For about three months to six months, Sakamoto stopped taking piano and composition lessons at all, and he suddenly felt that something was missing in his body, and only then did he realize the importance of music to him.

When he started studying music again, Ryuichi Sakamoto, a junior high school student, visited the piano teacher and composition teacher to apologize to them and asked the teachers to let him come back to class. When he quit the basketball team to concentrate on music, Ryuichi Sakamoto was also severely beaten by the captain in the dark at the end of the corridor. In the past, when composing music, Ryuichi Sakamoto spent one night writing and turning it in like writing math practice problems. But from then on, Sakamoto Ryu began to seriously devote himself to studying composition.

After high school, Ryuichi Sakamoto's life began to have ups and downs, and the year he was admitted to high school (1967), two student protests broke out in Japan. It was just when Liberty was about to take shape. Ryuichi Sakamoto, a high school student, spends his time listening to music and reading extracurricular books, and spends his time either dating his girlfriend or attending demonstrations, skipping class every day.

In the coffee shop where student activists gathered at the time, if he wanted to talk to girls, Sakamoto usually talked about politics: "What do you think of what is happening in Vietnam?" When asked, the convenience will answer: "I don't think war is right." Then he asked the other party to go to the demonstration together: "I agree with you, let's go to the march tomorrow!" During the parade, Sakamoto thoughtfully protected the girl, telling her to stand in the middle of the line as much as possible and not to be hit by the police's mobile team.

The end of high school life also coincided with the "Age of Deconstruction," and Sakamoto threw himself into the student movement "trying to dismantle the school and social system," and in his view, his contemporaries were also using extreme forms to try to break the existing musical system and structure. At that time, he always thought that Western music had developed to the extreme, and people must liberate their hearing from the shackles of traditional music.

"I feel that the problem I felt at that time has not changed to this day, and the prototype of Ryuichi Sakamoto may have quietly formed at this time." He recalled.

▲ Ryuichi Sakamoto, Harutomi Hosono, and Yukihiro Takahashi Yellow Magic Orchestra

The necessity of silence

"It feels like the remains of a piano after drowning." At the beginning of the documentary, in 2012 in Miyagi Prefecture in northeastern Japan, Ryuichi Sakamoto says that his vehicle staggered through the 3.11 earthquake. The piano he was talking about, which had been soaked in water in the tsunami, had lost its tune, and some keys could not be rebounded after being pressed.

For this tuned piano, Sakamoto talks about the process of making the piano, explaining how since the Industrial Revolution people have made it possible for the piano to produce beautiful music by imposing civilization on nature. "We humans say this (piano walking) is out of place, but that's not entirely accurate." When there was a problem with the tuning of the instrument, he stated that "it is trying to return to its natural state".

In the documentary, Sakamoto is particularly enthusiastic when analyzing Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's use of Bach's music, water, wind and footsteps in the 1972 sci-fi suspense film "Solaris". He was fascinated by the rich musical world of Tarkovsky's films, and then he also tried to think with film thinking in the albums he created, trying to make music like a film score.

"The most important thing I learned from Ryuichi is the importance of being silent in music." Christian Fennesz, a young Austrian electronic and sound experimental musician who collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, once said: "No two people have more space between two tones than Ryuichi. ”

The conflict between industry and nature, and Ryuichi Sakamoto's embrace of both, runs through the documentary. However, the opening scene of the documentary devotes up to 12 minutes to show the activities related to the Fukushima nuclear accident after the March 11 earthquake. "More political than artistic and musical." Ryuichi Sakamoto once commented on the beginning of this paragraph in an interview with foreign media.

On March 11, 2011, Ryuichi Sakamoto held a benefit concert in New York City when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of northeastern Japan. As secondary disasters such as the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the earthquake continued, many Japanese artists from overseas returned to Japan to raise funds and donations. In the following series of events, Ryuichi Sakamoto's statement at a large rally opposing the restart of nuclear power plants "cannot put your life in danger just to use electricity" led to criticism in Japan.

"I always felt that no matter what we said, no one above could hear us. Finally, silence returned, and the Japanese have been silent for more than forty years. In the documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto said, "Whether it is the nuclear power plant accident and some problems in the disaster area, or the political and social situation in Japan after the disaster, everything is deteriorating... If I don't speak my thoughts, I feel very depressed. I can't turn a blind eye. ”

He recalls that in the early '90s he began to focus on environmental issues. "I realized it wasn't going to work like this, but what wouldn't work, it's not clear. But as artists and musicians, there is a simple sensitivity. The environment does not destroy itself, but because of human activity, we have to repair it, and of course there are ways to stop it, so I will start to express this concern. Ryuichi Sakamoto, in his 1999 opera Life, expressed reflections on the atomic bombings, and he also opposed terrorist attacks, racial discrimination, and war.

"I think there are all kinds of sub-regiments in the world, there are all kinds of gaps, there are gaps, the gap between the north and the south, and of course, the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between weapons and military, why should these gaps be regarded as the objects of elimination? There are really a lot of unreasonable and disagreements in this world. He said.

In 2001, on the morning of the 9/11 incident, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who lived in the West Village of New York, heard the sound of "bang", and as soon as he went out, he saw the twin towers he saw burning in front of him every day. Several birds flew in front of the burning twin towers. He remembers, "At this moment I was interested in the opposition between nature and man-made fire, why can birds fly by without incident? ”

The following week, all sounds of Manhattan music and everything disappeared. A week later, he walked to New York's Union Square and saw some young people playing "Yesterday Reenacted" on guitar, and he remembered that he hadn't heard music in seven days. "It can only be seen that music culture can only exist in a peaceful environment."

Southern People Weekly reporter Zhao Lei