Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is streaming on MUBI and available on disc from Kino Lorber
Death eludes us. We are, of course, surrounded by death. We see others die, we hear about the death of others. We learn, soon enough, that we too will die. After a particularly nasty accident, a violent illness, or just a standard near miss, we are reminded of this. We turn the pages of journals or books and discover death as a philosophical problem, as a narrative device, as an object of analysis. The teller of a story is, however, immortal. There are no first-person narrations of death, only tales of decline and near misses. A story of death is always the tale of someone else’s death. Even those convinced of the paranormal and otherworldly concede this. The moans of ghouls and the ghost tapping on the wall, the Ouija board and the demonic howl all attest to this problem, these inhuman noises can tell no narrative.
There is an opposition between narrative and death. This is best seen not in novels but in the radical transformations documentaries undergo after their subject has passed. The interview style dominate in many documentaries cuts the interviewer and leaves the interviewee pontificating to the camera, reminiscing unprompted. We witness less so an interview and more so psychoanalysis perfected: the subject in front of the camera, on the couch; the analyst the silent recording camera; us, later, working through.
This can only work for a living subject. This is the tension apparent in Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, a 2017 documentary directed by Stephen Nomura Schible. This film has undergone a shift, its meaning has recently been altered. With Sakamoto’s passing at the end of March, the tone of the film has changed, its understanding of why we might learn something about the nature of life and death. In short, the film has become a monument, an act of remembrance, and what was once an open-ended piece dedicated to the human spirit has ossified into a tombstone. The photo in the locket that once sprung hope now renders us melancholy.
Coda opens with Sakamoto playing a piano that has survived the 2012 tsunami in Fukushima, Japan. He says he felt like he was “playing the corpse of a piano who had drowned.” The first fifteen minutes of the film focus on Sakamoto’s antinuclear activism in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, as he tours the destruction around Fukushima and protests in front of the Prime Minister’s residency, calling for the end of nuclear power in Japan. This opening is a diversion, of course. The real decay is inside Sakamoto. After we see him playing the opening to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence accompanied by violin and cello, his name appears across a black intertitle. Sakamoto then appears in his New York home and tells us that he “never expected this to happen. The thought of cancer never even crossed my mind.”
Coda stages two stories of decay. One is of the environment. We learn more and more about Sakamoto’s long-standing interest in environmental activism, his sense that ever since 1992, “something was wrong.” A 1984 interview with Sakamoto plays, where he tells us “I am interested in the erosion of technology such as errors or noises.” Sakamoto the pioneering electronic musician and Sakamoto the environmental activist converge at this point. In between all this are scenes of Sakamoto struggling to eat breakfast – he cannot produce enough salvia to swallow properly - and coughing over a grand piano as he writes the soundtrack to The Revenant.
The film follows a series of reflections on Sakamoto’s work. Yellow Magic Orchestra, composing the soundtracks for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, The Last Emperor, and The Sheltering Sky. This last film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of Paul Bowles’ novel, allows Coda to shift back to Sakamoto’s illness. There is one passage from Bowles’ book that is remarkable, an overwhelming summation of existential dread at the tragedy of life and our inescapable finitude. In Bertolucci’s film, Bowles himself speaks these famous lines:
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Sakamoto tells the documentary crew that he is working on song in which this passage will be read out in multiple languages over the drone of a tuning bell. Working on the piece – which appeared n his 2017 album async as “fullmoon” - he smiles as the rhythm of the passage weaves in out of the rhythm of the drone.
When Coda was made Sakamoto had had cancer for three years. Shortly after the reveal of his diagnosis he says that he does not know how much longer he has to live – five years, ten years, maybe even twenty. The film’s title is a tribute of course to music, the coda is the final movement in a piece of music. The term is almost indistinguishable from the more well-known term outro. Yet an outro marks, in typical usage, a short conclusion. The coda finalises, but this process of finalisation does not have a set length. As it turns out, Sakamoto would work and live for another ten years after his diagnosis. Coda ends with Sakamoto at the piano. It is cold and his stiff fingers struggle to hammer out the phrase he is practicing. He rubs his hands together and tells us: “I have to keep moving my fingers. That’s what I’ll do. Seriously.” The credits roll.
The above cited passage from The Sheltering Sky is often taken to remind us of our finitude. We are limited beings, fooled into a sense of eternity by an inability to comprehend our demise. And yet, oddly, this idea places infinity within our finite lives. Right now we are eternal, everything seems limitless but can only be realised as limited after the end. Eternity is all that happens between the beginning and the end.
Death eludes us. One way it eludes us is that it can only be reckoned with from outside. Someone else’s death is always the death we experience, and thus we never really experience death. This is perhaps what German philosopher Martin Heidegger meant when he wrote: “We do not experience the dying of others in a genuine sense; we are at best always just ‘near by’.”1 Heidegger makes much of death, much of our finitude, of our inability to experience death, and sees us as creatures who must confront the fact of our death, of our being-towards-death, if we wish to live our lives properly. Heidegger here echoes Seneca, who Bowles himself echoes. Seneca admonishes those who whittle away their finite lives:
You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals.2
Carpe Diem. Anyone at the initial stage of confronting their mortality will, upon reflection, realise that to live all you can makes any kind of planning impossible. Every project and endeavour becomes infeasible. All the things that matter to us, love and friendship, art and writing, community and memory, are created over time. Heidegger worries that if one does not confront our death we cannot live authentically, but we cannot live at all if we truly internalise our fragility.
Heidegger is not so foolish as to believe that confronting death means a kind of frattish living in the moment. His focus on death, however, produces a strange moment. It was Jacques Derrida who noticed a certain blending of the finite and the infinite in Hediegger’s deathcentric analysis. In his book Aporias Derrida asks, “Can I experience my own death?” The question is Heideggerian in the extreme. If Heidegger is right that death forms the horizon of our lives, that it represents some kind of boundary, then we have to know if this boundary can be understood and experienced. If the boundary is absolute, and it seems like it must be, then there are some rather incredible implications. In a stunning passage, Derrida writes the following:
A mortal can only start from here, from his morality. His possible belief in immortality, his irresistible interest in the beyond, in gods or spirits, what makes survival structure every instant in a kind of irreducible torsion, the torsion of a retrospective anticipation that introduces the untimely moment and the posthumous in the most alive of the present living thing, the rear view mirror of waiting-for-death at every moment, and the future anterior that precedes even the present, which it only seems to modify, all this stems from his morality, Heidegger would say. No matter how serious all this remains, it would thus only be secondary. This very secondariness testifies to the primordiality of being-toward-death, of being-until-death, or, as one could also say of being-to-death. Only a being-to-death can think, desire, project, indeed, “live” immortality as such.3
Mortality and immortality suddenly belong together. Heidegger is right to suggest death as the unsurpassable limit, as both the possibility and impossibility of what it means to be a human being. Yet the turn to finitude, the invocation of a Stoic concern with our mortality, with the shortness of life, is not the consequence of such an analysis. If I cannot experience my death, then I live immortality. This does not mean I do not die, it means I am eternal so long as I live. There is no other way to be.
This is all abstract, but here is what this shift in perspective means. We tend to assume that the mid-life crisis is the bourgeois confrontation with death. Having secured everything possible, one realises all that earning, property assessing and spouse neglecting was a waste of time. The sports car, dumb young mistress and drugs soon follow. This cliché is expressed to us as a realization that time is running out, that clock is ticking. Rather, it is a crude and vulgar expression of infinity. The midlife crisis is not the signal of coming death, it is the realization that vitality extends for much longer than we originally thought. The abyss confronted is not that of the void that consumes us all but of the limitless well of life. It is the realization that one does have time for what they thought they never would.
When we place a life on a timeline, pin down its beginning and its end, then we can quantify how many times one has watched the full moon rise. Yet the calculation necessarily requires the end, and there may be a gap between a life lived and one remembered. Walter Benjamin, in his essay The Storyteller alludes to this fact:
‘A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,’ said Moritz Heimann once, ‘is at every point of his life a man who dies at the at the age of thirty-five.’ Nothing is more dubious than this sentence – but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man – so says the truth that was meant here – who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life.4
Coda is an unsettling film because it sat somewhere between real life and remembered life. Seeing the film after the news of Sakamoto’s death is now overwhelming, the opening conceit is clear. There is no shock when he announces his cancer. There is no surprise. The opening scenes amongst Fukushima are now melancholic in the extreme, his mark about the piano he finds being a corpse is not witty or amusing but grim and foreboding.
Although the dominant tone of Coda changes in recent watching, something remains. The film’s final moments retain their hopeful tone. Sakamoto, recovering and dedicated to continuing his work betrays not hope for himself now, but hope for us. Spinoza writes that the “free man thinks least of death,” and one reason is that the work – specifically for Spinoza the work of understanding - even if merely the work of living, continues. Sakamoto sits in his New York City apartment listening to Bowles’ most famous passage from The Sheltering Sky on loop and realises that between now and the end it all seems limitless. This “seems” is misleading. Only from the outside, from the perspective of remembrance is our limitless an illusion. From within, then, it really is limitless. Death eludes us. This also means, however, that until our deaths we are immortal.
From Being in Time, Joan Stambaugh’s translation published by SUNY Press.
From Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life” quoted by Derrida in Aporias.
Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford University Press).
“The Storyteller” as translated by Harry Zohn, featured in the collection Illuminations (Mariner Books).
Duncan Stuart is an Australian writer. His writings have appeared in Firmament, 3:AM Magazine, The Cleveland Review of Books, Jacobin, and Overland. He publishes a monthly substack, Exit Only, and can be found on Twitter @DuncanAStuart.