Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

If there’s a single song that defines Ryuichi Sakamoto as a composer, it’s his title theme for director Nagisa Ōshima’s 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a piece that jettisoned Sakamoto to international stardom, and would echo through his recording and performing career for the rest of his life. With its plaintive, impressionistically Asian pentatonic melody set against emotional chords inspired by the French romantics like Claude Debussy—whose influence Sakamoto frequently referenced at the time—the piece very tidily encapsulates Sakamoto’s working methodology. “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” is a close reading of 20th-century modernism’s East-West feedback loop, one that’s realized within the post-modern landscape of 1980s techno-capitalism, resulting in something both vividly contemporary and distinctly Japanese. Constructed of Sakamoto’s piano, digital bell tones and sparse, air-infused claves, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence“ features a careful command of compositional space, one that would help form the blueprint for the “ambient-pop” style emerging within the kayōkyoku ecosystem. The piece has become a cultural touchstone even beyond Japan, where it’s appeared everywhere from the infamous infomercial-hawked New Age compilation Pure Moods to Ariana Gande’s moodboard (see “Thank U, Next”). But that canonical song need not eclipse Sakamoto’s other pieces on this soundtrack, which find him flexing his flair for digital abstraction via synthesizers and post-production techniques (assisted by studio legend Seigen Ono). From the synthetic gamelan of “Batavia” to the warbled, widescreen Prophet-5 synths of “Last Regrets,” we get the first seeds of what became Sakamoto’s long and fruitful side-career in film scoring and sound design. The coda “Forbidden Colors” recasts the main theme as a vocal backdrop for David Sylvian, who would go on to become a lifelong collaborator, with Sylvian writing lyrics inspired by Yukio Mishima’s 1951 novel of the same name (which is especially interesting when you consider that Sakamoto’s father, Kazuki Sakamoto, helped launch Mishima’s literary career in the 1940s).