Try Saying You're Alive!
Kazuki Tomokawa in His Own Words
Originally published as the Introduction to Try Saying You’re Alive! by Kazuki Tomokawa (Blank Forms Editions, 2021)
Kazuki Tomokawa is a man of paradox. As he describes in this highly entertaining and eminently quotable memoir, he is a singer who cannot sing, a guitarist who cannot tune the instrument, a loner who craves company, “a bashful attention hog,” a misfit who was elected student council president, a layabout who never stops working. He doesn’t even enjoy the rakkyo pickles, of which he is inordinately proud, that he claims to make in batches of up to 130 pounds a year: “For my part, I like to eat them raw with miso.” At shows, he asks for requests and then he doesn’t play them. He’s a bar brawler who cannot fight (“I’ve been in a million fights and I’ve lost them all”), an artist — poet and painter as well as prolific songwriter — who declares, “The journey of self-discovery is a farce.” “God, I’m hard to handle,” he sighs on one of these pages. “Being with myself is the most exhausting thing imaginable.” When a glimpse of Marie Kondo on television inspires him to throw away possessions that do not spark joy, he trashes his own poetry notebooks (over his manager’s objection). Tomokawa is also a gambler, with a particular passion (and skill) for the bicycle races known in Japan as keirin. “I’m not trying to be funny when I say this,” he explains: “If you asked me to give up keirin or my humanity, I’d probably choose my humanity.” Still, “What is the appeal of keirin?” he asks himself. “People,” he answers.
Tomokawa is the most pataphysical person I have ever met.