Samaha Suzimuha’s earliest childhood memories were of the devastation wrought on his family’s home in Tokyo by American firebombing. Academics in later years continually tried to link his work as a composer to apocalyptic themes, anti-militarism, and anti-Americanism. Suzimuha’s response was always the same:

“Music is a vessel to be filled with one’s own politics. Flowerpots have no politics.”

After a brief period of lyrical romanticism following his compositional studies at the University of Tokyo, Suzimuha embraced an extreme modernistic sound. His works were written in an aleatoric style often bordering on musique concréte with strong echoes of Krzysztof Penderecki and John Cage. The composer wrote several large-scale commissions like his Suite for Scythes Falling on Cherry Blossoms (1970) and Music for the Coming War (1975), but the same avant-garde tendencies which attracted notice in critical circles made Suzimuha unpopular with concertgoing audiences.

To make ends meet, especially following a protracted divorce from his wife Michiko beginning in 1978, Suzimuha wrote music in his signature style for television commercials, animated shows, and films. The highly personal style and lack of “easy listening” qualities that his work possessed were highly polarizing; when he took over for an ill composer for the anime series Demon-Capturing Sakura in 1986, for instance, he only scored seven episodes before massive public pressure led to his replacement. His score for the Toho kaiju film Gyokusai: Shatterer of Worlds (1987) was an even greater debacle, with the music reportedly leading to nausea, seizures, and vomiting in cinema aisles. The print was pulled from circulation and reissued with a new score by Oshita Kishimoto and the soundtrack album recalled, making both rare collector’s items.

Disillusioned, Suzimuha retired to a small house near Sapporo he had inherited from relatives and continued to compose in near-total isolation. Admirers would seek him out, and supported him with donations; for his part, Suzimuha was happy to compose and sign small pieces for those who went to the trouble of seeking him out. But he eventually earned a reputation as a “cursed” composer, because his latter-day music was not only technically challenging but because many–even his fans–reported discomfort, hallucinations, and occasionally even temporary psychoses after listening to it.

The last ten years of Suzimuha’s life were spent in isolation, working on what admirers called his Symphonia Ultima or Ultimate Symphony. Suzimuha himself called it Kawara, perhaps in an ironic counterpart to Gyokusai; the former meant “roof tile” and the later “shattered jade.” Japanese pre-war militaristic thinking had linked the two concepts, positing that it was better to be a shattered jade than an intact roofing tile.

He died in his sleep of unclear causes in 1996, at the age of 56. His housekeeper found him facedown at his piano, unfinished notes for Kawara in front of him. Despite being all but finished, the work has never been performed and copies of it circulate amongst collectors with a massive dollar amount attached. Rumors that those selfsame collectors wind up dead, institutionalized, or suicidal remain unsubstantiated.

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