On November 19, ten days before what would have been Yutaka Ozaki's 61st birthday, his widow, Shigemi, will publish a memoir about the two Ozaki men in her life, the husband she lost when she was 24 and the son she raised after his death. The book, “Futari no Ozaki”, grew out of essays she began writing for FRaU in April 2022, on the 30th anniversary of his death.
The man in those essays is different from the one Japan remembers. Ozaki became famous at eighteen for singing about the indignities of adolescence, the cruelty of authority and the desire to be free. At home, he could be possessive and jealous. He dreamed of running away with Shigemi to an uninhabited island. His medication and his career put a growing strain on their marriage. Eventually he asked for a separation, and his affair with the actress Yuki Saito became tabloid news. They reconciled before he died in 1992.
I've been reading Shigemi's installments on my phone on the train, which is where I first heard Ozaki's music as a teenager. For years I knew him through his voice, his writing and the questions he kept asking about how a person ought to live. It is quite disorienting to read about the private life of a man whose songs once seemed to understand mine so completely.
Throughout high school, I cried almost every morning on the Keiyo Line on my way to class. The train runs along Tokyo Bay, past warehouses, container yards and reclaimed land, and I would look out at the water and wonder whether I would ever get out, what I was alive for, and whether my anger would ever amount to anything.
I was an angry kid. My school was one of the most competitive private schools in the country. The point of it was the University of Tokyo, and the point of the University of Tokyo, we didn’t quite know. I had spent part of my childhood abroad and wanted to go to college in America, so I spent six days a week preparing for an exam I was never going to take. I was also a gentle kid, I think. I noticed who sat alone at lunch. But I carried a steady hatred that scared me. I hated the rules, the teachers who enforced them and the students who seemed content to win by them. When I tried to talk about it, my classmates didn't argue. They laughed through their noses and went back to their practice tests, and I hated them more for that than I would have if they'd fought me. I wanted them to be angry. I couldn't stand the possibility that they were fine. Some of them, I know now, were not fine at all, but I knew nothing about their lives, and they knew nothing about mine.
Ozaki entered Aoyama Gakuin, another competitive private school, in 1981, when Japanese schools were answering a wave of student violence with more surveillance and harsher rules. At seventeen he passed an audition for CBS/Sony, and his first album came out in December 1983. Its first single, 15 no Yoru, is the motorcycle song. A boy steals a bike and rides off into the night, and for a few minutes nobody owns him. It's still the image people use for Ozaki, and for Japanese teenage rebellion in general.
Everybody knows Ozaki didn't graduate. On March 15, 1984, the day of his class's ceremony at Aoyama Gakuin High School, he was across town playing his first solo show at Shinjuku RUIDO, having dropped out a few months earlier. The room held three hundred people and about six hundred came. The story has been told so often it has become a myth, the kid who skipped his own graduation to become the voice of everyone else's. What gets left out is something his producer, Akira Sudo, said years later. Ozaki had wanted to graduate.
Sudo, who knew him from the start, described someone closer to an honor student than a delinquent, polite, eager and anxious about letting people down. Ozaki was the son of a Ground Self-Defense Force officer and grew up in a house where rules mattered. He was furious at school, and he was ashamed of being furious.
In January 1985, less than a year after leaving, Ozaki released Graduation, a six-and-a-half-minute reckoning with the adolescence he'd left behind. It recalls shattered classroom windows, fights with teachers and the belief that giving in to authority meant defeat. Even among friends, there was little relief from the loneliness of growing up.
In the final verse, Ozaki starts to question the rebellion itself. He asks where their anger should have been aimed, whether the teachers were also answering to an authority that held them back, and what would restrain him once school was over. How many times, he wonders, must he graduate from himself before he becomes who he really is?
I listened to that verse until it stopped meaning anything and then started meaning something again. I wanted someone in charge to admit the rules were arbitrary. I argued with everyone, every day, and every morning nothing changed. After a while, staying alive seemed like a project I didn't have the energy for. I thought about dying for a long time, and then I tried to kill myself.
Afterward I held on to one idea, which was leaving. If I could graduate, I'd find people who cared about what I cared about, and I'd get to decide what my life was for. I couldn't imagine any freedom that didn't involve a plane. Ozaki, who wrote Graduation after he'd already left, seems to have known that leaving and being free weren't the same thing.
Sudo remembered that many teachers liked Graduation. Some schools asked permission to use the lyrics on Japanese-language exams, and Ozaki was thrilled. The kid who quit school wanted the people who ran schools to think he was a good writer. I find this almost unbearably touching, partly because I know how badly I wanted the adults I despised to listen to me, to see that my anger came from something more serious than a refusal to obey. Maybe I wanted their approval, though I would’ve been furious with anyone who said so.
<Image: Thirty years later, Shigemi Ozaki finds catharsis in revisiting her memories of Yutaka and their family. Photo courtesy of Shigemi Ozaki.>
By the summer of 1985, Ozaki was playing to twenty-six thousand people at Osaka Stadium, and his second album had gone to No. 1. He was nineteen. On that album is a song called Shelly, in which he asks someone he badly needs whether he's any good, whether he's lost too much chasing this, whether he can keep going.
In 1986 he stopped performing and went to New York, where he spent much of his time alone. When he came back, he was using. In December 1987 he was arrested for methamphetamine possession and later given a suspended sentence. The next spring he married Shigemi, and that year he sold out the Tokyo Dome. In July 1989 their son, Hiroya, was born.
The usual story says this is when he grew up. Shigemi's account says otherwise. He was stuck in a contract dispute with his management and couldn't make records the way he wanted. He was taking more and more medication. He became possessive and jealous to a degree she found frightening and exhausting, and he kept saying he wanted to go somewhere nobody could reach them. Then he asked for a separation, the weekly magazines broke the story of his affair, reporters surrounded the house where she lived with their baby, and the two of them went to divorce mediation. They reconciled.
In November 1990, in the middle of all this, he released a double album called Birth. The title track is written to his son. It tells the child he has every right to exist, and it comes back, as Ozaki's songs nearly always did, to how much people want to stop being alone.
Around dawn on April 25, 1992, a resident in Adachi found him lying injured in a private garden. He was taken home, and by that evening he was dead of pulmonary edema, at twenty-six. Methamphetamine was found in his system. His last album came out a few weeks later, and tens of thousands of people lined up to say goodbye.
Most retellings treat his death as the last scene of the rebellion, as if the classroom finally won, or as if he was simply too intense for this world. I don't think either is honest. By the end there were no teachers left to fight. He had the career, the audience, the money, a wife who stayed and a son he wrote songs to. And in the songs he was still asking what he'd asked at nineteen. Would he ever feel free? Did he deserve love? Would the life he'd fought for make him happy? He kept asking while he hurt the people who could have answered, and while his life came apart in ways everyone around him could see.
Hiroya, now a singer-songwriter himself, has said he prefers much of his father's later work, the songs written after the obvious enemies were gone, when Ozaki was trying to put himself back together with no one to push against. Hiroya was two when his father died. He has said Birth is the song that made him think about what it means to be alive.
The Keiyo Line platform at Tokyo Station is so far underground that the walk to it takes almost as long as some of the rides. I used to count the escalators. Now I mostly answer emails on them. Last month, on the way down, I opened the installment where Shigemi writes that she loved him more the harder it got.
