The Starting Point of a Film Composer
Toru Takemitsu's career as a film composer began in earnest with Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit in 1956. Based on Shintaro Ishihara's novel, this Nikkatsu youth film portrays the decadence of the postwar generation and is considered a precursor of Japan's New Wave. Influenced by his mentor Fumio Hayasaka, Takemitsu supplied an innovative score incorporating jazz and electric guitar together with his contemporary Masaru Sato. The film's success helped establish his position in film music.
The 1960s were a period of great advancement for Takemitsu as a film composer. He worked on a succession of highly artistic films representative of postwar Japan, including Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri (1962) and Kwaidan (1964), Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kobo Abe's Pitfall (1962) and Woman in the Dunes (1964), and Masahiro Shinoda's The Face of Another (1966). In these films, he also took on something like a music director's role, becoming deeply involved in overall sound design as well as music.
His work in this period overturned conventional ideas of film music. He engaged with each film's world from the script stage, exchanging views closely with directors and writers to create sonic spaces integrated with the images. Drawing on his experience in Jikken Kobo, he applied electronic music and musique concrète techniques to cinema, bringing contemporary music into Japanese film.
Masterpieces That Established International Recognition
Woman in the Dunes (1964) secured Takemitsu's reputation in film music. In Hiroshi Teshigahara's unusual drama about a man and woman trapped in a pit among sand dunes, he created sound combining dissonant strings and environmental noise. In scenes of wind blowing sand, for example, layering actual wind with the low growl of strings doubles the texture of the images. The music is minimal and fragmented throughout, with almost no recognizable melody.
Instead, a sonic space dominated by silence and strange noises heightens unease, creating a suffocation like sinking into sand. Takemitsu also composed the concert work Dorian Horizon (1966) from material recorded for the film, experimenting with developing film music ideas back into concert music. Along with the film's international success, its music was highly praised as a happy marriage of sound and image.
In Kwaidan from the same year, an anthology richly visualizing Lafcadio Hearn's ghost stories, Takemitsu took sole responsibility for the sound design of all four sections. In the particularly famous Hoichi the Earless, live biwa performance and electronic echo effects accompanying the blind musician's ghostly storytelling create a mysterious, unsettling sound world. Recording real sounds such as rain and creaking wood and layering them with instruments, and treating the voice itself as sonic material, he created a powerful presence through sound alone even in scenes without living people. Kwaidan won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and his music was praised for accompanying the images while possessing independent artistry.
Musical Exploration in Socially Engaged and Literary Films
In the 1970s, Takemitsu continued at the forefront of Japanese cinema, scoring socially engaged and literary works such as Nagisa Oshima's The Ceremony (1971) and Masahiro Shinoda's Silence (1971). He also first collaborated with Akira Kurosawa, providing music for the unusual drama of ordinary people Dodes'ka-den (1970). More introspective, psychological musical expression was pursued in these works, further refining his language.
For Silence, a weighty film about the persecution of Christians based on Shusaku Endo's novel, Takemitsu responded with restrained sound. He expressed cultural conflict musically by contrasting Western Christian music with traditional Japanese music. For Oshima's ambitious The Ceremony, about changes in the postwar family system, he provided a complex score combining contemporary dissonance with traditional Japanese instruments.
His music in this period moved beyond simple dramatic accompaniment to acquire philosophical resonance deeply linked to each film's themes. It often connected with motifs such as nature, silence, and loss. In Woman in the Dunes, dealing with alienation and loneliness, dry percussion and faint electronic sounds emphasize the characters' isolation; in Harakiri, portraying the emptiness of bushido, out-of-tune biwa and dissonant piano suggest the collapse of the samurai class. Takemitsu said that film music extends what a director feels and communicates emotions invisible to audiences. True to those words, he excelled at expressing hidden drama and psychology through sound.
Ran, a Late Epic and the Culmination of His Film Music
Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985) can be considered the culmination of Takemitsu's film music. A late Kurosawa epic based on Shakespeare's King Lear, it was also Takemitsu's largest-scale film music project. Kurosawa initially conceived of using Noh chanting but ultimately asked for weighty orchestral music reminiscent of Gustav Mahler's symphonies. Although puzzled by the request, Takemitsu completed a magnificent score.
The music is used with restraint in the first half and comes fully to the fore for the first time in the climactic battle sequence. The interplay of mournful melody and dissonant chords over otherwise silent slaughter is extraordinarily memorable, giving audiences an intense emotional experience. In response to Kurosawa's request for something Mahler-like, the music has been described as both Mahler and not Mahler. Its vast sonic space and solemn tragedy are Mahlerian, while harmony and development retain Takemitsu's individual modernity, integrating the music thoroughly with the images.
Ran's score won Best Music from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and received worldwide acclaim as a landmark in film music history. Later, in Shohei Imamura's Black Rain (1989), Takemitsu quoted and developed his earlier Requiem for Strings to express the tragedy of Hiroshima's atomic bombing. In this work about death and rebirth after the bombing, repeated mournful melodies based on his Requiem convey both remembrance and hope. Takemitsu died in 1996 at 65, but scored more than 90 films during his lifetime, leaving his name in Japanese and international film history through original sound design. His work remains a textbook-like presence in film music, continuing to influence many composers.
