Music Sets You Free

AS HARPERCOLLINS PREPARES TO publish the first English-language translation of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Music Sets You Free, which combines his twin autobiographical tomes Music Sets You Free and How Many More Times Will I Watch the Full Moon Rise? into a single volume, Metrograph pays homage to the prodigious, generational talent by screening a quartet of cinematic portraits: Sakamoto on Screen, Portraits of an Artist, and by sharing this excerpt from the opening chapter of Sakamoto’s luminous memoir. The book will soon be available for purchase from the Metrograph Bookstore.

Kindergarten Days

Rabbit’s Song

One more thing that stands out among my memories of kindergarten is the rabbit we were tasked with taking care of over summer break. It got passed from house to house, and before long, my turn came. When you’re that age, having an animal show up at your front door is an enormous event. Every day, I gave it fresh greens and made sure that it had everything it needed.

In September, at the start of the new term, the teacher gave us an assignment: “How did you like looking after the rabbit this summer? Turn the way it felt into a piece of music. Let’s put on our songwriting caps.”

We had to come up with the lyrics and the melody ourselves. I started with the words. I wrote down something really basic, like “the rabbit has red eyes.” Then I tacked on a melody. I’m pretty sure my mother helped me write out the sheet music that I sub- mitted for homework. We recorded the song, too. I used to have a flexi disc of me singing the song, but I can’t find it anywhere. It was the first song that I ever wrote. I was maybe four or five.

The experience was absolutely thrilling. As much as caring for the rabbit left a deep impression on me, turning it into a song was even more exhilarating. I almost couldn’t believe they let me do something like this.

It was a frantic kind of happiness. Like this was mine and mine entirely, unlike anything that anyone had ever made before. It felt incredible.

At the same time, the whole process struck me as weird. The rabbit, a physical being, and the song that I’d thought up were not explicitly related, but now they had been fused together. It was so strange. Without the rabbit, the song couldn’t exist, and yet this animal that bit my hand, whose poop I had scooped up, was something altogether separate from the thing that I created.

While I of course wasn’t capable of this kind of objective thinking at that age, I still picked up on some kind of a discrepancy or strangeness going on, in whatever way a kindergartner processes that kind of thing. This was a formative experience for me.

The Bounds of Music, the Power of Music

As I write this in 2006, there’s a war happening in Lebanon. War rips families apart. Let’s say a boy in Lebanon has just lost his beloved little sister to an Israeli air strike. Stricken with grief, that boy creates a piece of music. But in the instant that he turns these feelings into music, they enter the realm of song, disengaged from his sister’s death.

It’s a lot like putting feelings into words. By writing them down, you surrender their power to the realm of language, where the clarity, the vividness, the punchiness of how you form the sentences become the primary concern. Music is the same; no matter how grief-stricken you are about your sister’s death, once you let music run the show, the problem becomes musical, no longer of this world. Now it’s operating on a level altogether separate from the sister’s death, irrevocably severed from reality.

On its own, this boy’s experience of his sister’s death is just a memory. Once he’s gone, it fades away, disappearing into the murk of history, but if it’s turned into a song, it can be shared with others, all the people in the world. Leaving personal experience behind for the world of music, a memory breaks free from the bounds of time and space. Such is the power of music.

Expression, though, can only bridge the gap between our minds and others if we transform feelings into a form others can understand. Hence the push toward things like abstraction and reduction in the creative process. Our experiences of joy and pain must become impersonal, detached from who we are inside. There’s a limit to what one can get across. Things will unavoidably be lost along the way. But in place of what is lost, a channel opens up that enables people elsewhere, in a different country or a different world, to tune in and understand things in a similar way. Language, music, culture, all comes down to this. That’s how it works.


Music Sets You Free by Ryuichi Sakamoto will be published on September 22 by HarperVia, and available to purchase from the Metrograph Bookstore. This excerpt is reproduced with the permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2026 HarperCollins.