Sakamoto’s swan song

“I know that I want to make more music,” said the Japanese composer-musician Ryuichi Sakamoto in Stephen Nomura Schible’s 2017 documentary Coda, “music that I won’t be ashamed to leave behind—meaningful work.”

Sakamoto made that comment in his mid-60s, and what he’d “leave behind” was on his mind because he’d recently been diagnosed with cancer. He would live only until March 2023.

A few months before he died, Sakamoto added one last piece of “meaningful work” to his already impressive legacy: Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, a stark yet visually layered black-and-white film directed by his son Neo Sora that ran in select theaters earlier this year.

Actually, it’s 20 pieces of meaningful work—compositions drawn from nearly every phase of Sakamoto’s multifaceted career. Alone at a Yamaha grand piano, his silver hair glinting in the spotlight, Sakamoto performs each selection with a reflective tenderness and an autumnal sensitivity born of his love for subtle sounds and his knowledge that Opus would be his final recording.

Now, Milan Records has released the soundtrack. Even without the accompanying visuals—maybe in part because of the absence of visuals—the scope of Sakamoto’s swan song comes into focus. Reaching back to his days with the electronic disco-funk trio Yellow Magic Orchestra (“Tong Poo”) and his acclaimed post-YMO music for films (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; The Sheltering Sky; The Last Emperor; Babel), the program becomes an intimate musical autobiography. The emotionally resonant new compositions “BB” (for the director Bernardo Bertolucci) and “For Jóhann” (for the late Icelandic composer-­musician Jóhann Johannson) reveal that Sakamoto remained creatively engaged until the end.

He had made trial runs at such an approach before. The Opus soundtrack shares eight pieces, for instance, with the 2021 iteration of Playing the Piano, an album that, beginning in 2009, he released more than once, with varying track listings and subtitles. Like Opus, those recordings found Sakamoto stripping his compositions to their basics (in front of live but respectfully quiet audiences) and exploring them alone at the piano.

Those albums, with their interchangeable parts, felt like ever-evolving works in progress, somewhat like the multiple editions of Leaves of Grass that the poet Walt Whitman published between 1855 and 1882. At 96½ minutes, the Opus soundtrack represents a culmination.

Whitman’s final Leaves of Grass, incidentally, has come to be known as the “deathbed edition.” It’s a term, alas, that suits Sakamoto’s Opus too.