Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is an intimate portrait of one of the most important musicians of our era. The film begins in 2012, when Ryuichi launched the “No Nukes” concert in Tokyo, in response to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. From there, we travel back to Ryuichi’s 1970s beginnings with the disco-prog-jazz Yellow Magic Orchestra, and on to his scores for Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983)—in which he also played a leading role—and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky (1990). In 2014, Ryuichi was forced to take the first major break of his career when he was diagnosed with throat cancer. After a period of rest, he returned in 2015 to complete the scores for two films—Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant and Yoji Yamada’s Nagasaki: Memories of My Son. In 2017, where this documentary ends, Ryuichi released async , his most personal album to date.
