La Faute des Fleurs – a portrait of Kazuki Tomokawa (To the Moon & Back #4)

December 2008. It’s been four months since I received a long, mysterious email from Japan, one I barely paid attention to at the time. Around then, my friend, the cellist Gaspar Claus, had told me about a musician he had just discovered: Kazuki Tomokawa, a folk poet, a painter and a gambler in his spare time. The name echoed – wasn’t that the subject line of the Japanese email?

I finally read the message. Its purpose: to invite me to Japan to document this very musician on a small tour between Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. To celebrate, I asked Gaspar to join me – he would play a key musical role on the journey.

Meeting Tomokawa-san, beyond the barrier of language, felt like a recognition – a re-encounter with a poetic serpent who burns through kindred spirits across the globe. He stirred in me my own radicalities, my excesses, my loves, my howls, echoes from twenty or thirty years apart. Through his vivid language, the world around us turned once again into fuel for intoxication; our wanderings found wild escape routes through sound and image.

The rage that surges through him often drowns in sake (hot, preferably) served with a rich array of food and a curious circle of devoted fans. Tomokawa is a true creature of life, the kind to order a feast backstage two hours before the show, inviting anyone who walks by to taste it, risking, of course, stumbling onto stage, drunk on that sacred, poisonous, combustible brew.

The two-week trip was extraordinary. I extended it by a day just to witness the recording of his new album. The day passed slowly in a Tokyo studio: no tension, but no music either, not for a long time. The ‘howling poet’, as his fans (among them the legendary street photographer Daido Moriyama) call him, prepared himself around yet another table. It was late when he finally sat behind the microphone. There were ten songs to record. He did them all in a single take.

The last song was epic – everything seemed to shatter, explode, unravel. The strings snapped, the headphones flew from his face in a trance. I stood beside him, pulsing behind my camera in the sacred thunder he had summoned. Any other musician would have done another take. But Tomokawa was content – drunk, elated and mischievous – leaping out of the studio, fully aware that the dance of life, for him, could only ever be a dance on the edge of the abyss.

Watch La Faute des Fleurs – a portrait of Kazuki Tomokawa: