Before I introduce you to Missa Fukuma’s Festa Manifesto, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share how I first encountered her music. I was in Osaka, visiting Eiji’s Revelation Time record store, when I kept glancing at the stack of CDs on his counter. Fearing that I was taking too much of his time, a thought crossed my mind: “Why not just ask if he has anything he thinks I’d enjoy?” Rather than lording over him, why not let him decide?
As I gave him space to dig through his collection, I wandered off to thumb through his LPs. Lost in a blur of rare grooves, I suddenly heard a cryptic, robotic-sounding voice intoning through the speakers: “delete, guard.” What sounded like a pulsating dial tone transformed into an astonishing ambient techno melody. I caught other clipped lyrics: “color red, color blue, color yellow inside of us…” Then a voice rang out clearly, singing of “the sands of time” flowing through an hourglass—urgently pleading for someone to turn it over before the grains stopped coursing through.
For the 12 minutes that “砂時計 -View- (Sunadokei -View-)” played at Revelation Time, I genuinely lost my sense of time and space. I was transfixed. I knew then and there—this was what I was looking for. I told Eiji, “This—whatever this is. I’ll take it.”
So, thanks to Eiji, I can now take a deep breath and we can look back. We can look back to just who made this album, and I can introduce you to the story of the person behind this otherworldly music.
Missa’s story begins not far from Revelation Time, in Hyogo Prefecture. She was born in Osaka in 1964, barely surviving birth after the stillbirth of her older brother the year prior. Somehow, she lived long enough to become the third daughter in an abusive marriage, to an alcoholic father who desperately wanted a son.
Her early years were marked by hardship upon hardship, reflected most in her father’s lack of love and affection. At age three, she survived a traffic accident that sent her to the emergency room with severe head injuries. Her grandmother, blaming her mother for not producing a son, pressured her into trying for another child.
Six years later, in 1970, her younger brother Hajime Fukuma was born. In him, Missa found a strong connection—a sisterly tenderness and love she had longed for. At school, she faced the pain of being an outcast. Scrawny and “tomboyish,” she was often bullied by boys who called her a “man-woman.” In defiance, she formed a “Becoming a Man” squad with other adventurous girls, taking pride in playing games and doing things girls weren’t “supposed” to do. Teachers, rather than supporting her, tried to shame her into conformity by placing her in boys’ groups.
On an old, now-defunct website, Missa once shared fragments of these memories. She nearly committed suicide as a child to escape the bullying. Her distant mother expressed little affection. Her father, drunk and abusive, ruled their home with terror. By the end of fourth grade, she found some relief in ballet and fixated on the date 1999—a supposed doomsday, according to a friend’s reading of Nostradamus.
By fifth grade, Missa was consumed by the fear of death and disease. She made frequent, secret trips to medical clinics for blood tests, dreading diagnoses that thankfully never came. She hid other things too—her first lesbian love, and a gnawing darkness from living in the shadow of two “model” sisters.
Her journey to music began with writing. After moving to Tokyo, an early TV broadcast writing job led her to pursue theater, joining Shibuya’s Theater Cocoon troupe as an actress. There she met a young graphic designer, Mimiyo Tomozawa, and began experimenting with setting her words to music. Along with illustrator Wakabayashi Chika and keyboardist Tetsuya Saito—the only one as interested in music as she was—they formed a band called Risu.
Risu introduced Missa to the world as a musician. As a singer-songwriter, she moved to the center of the stage, no longer a background player. Risu affirmed she had something—an actual talent for songwriting and performing. When Risu dissolved in 1992, Missa didn’t let the vision die. She married, returned to acting, and appeared in films like 菊池(Kikuchi), directed by her husband Kenchi Iwamoto, and The Record Hunter by Hiroyuki Nakano. Her work with Nakano reignited her drive to pursue music solo.
It’s strange to think, but by the time she released her first solo album, Morse, in 1996, Missa already had a massive idea in mind: a cosmic tetralogy. The “Fukuma Universe Tetralogy,” meant to explore the past, present, future, and everything in between life and afterlife—in a sound as free-flowing as the idea itself. And the perfect partner for this vision? Her brother, Hajime.
Hajime had long shared a musical bond with Missa. Like her, he escaped their abrasive household as soon as he could. In the mid-’80s, he taught her guitar, but quickly moved on to synthesizers and electronic music production, immersing himself in the Technopop and New Wave scenes, even if he played a big role in spurring her exploration as a singer-songwriter. He eventually joined the legendary art rock band P-Model, contributing to albums like Corrective Errors (Re-mix Of 舟) and 電子悲劇/~Enola.
When Missa conceived her grand musical concept, Hajime was the obvious choice to help bring it to life. They thought: Why not combine acoustic and electronic music? Inspired by Everything But the Girl and Brian Eno, and with help from former Risu bandmate Tetsuya Saito, they explored what “future folk” could be.
As detailed in Festa Manifesto’s liner notes (by Mighty Headphone), the “cosmic” folk singer who performed in 1994 wasn’t the same one who appeared on Morse in 1996. Missa was determined to defy expectations. And this tetralogy had a deadline: 1999, a year long etched in her psyche.
On Morse, tracks like “マイクロ・チップ” and “ダンダン” hinted at a kind of folktronica—if you had to call it something. Love and fear of a nascent, computer-driven future were encoded into every sound. These early songs drew comparisons to Brigitte Fontaine and her collaborations with Pierre Barouh. In 1996, that “weird girl” had found a small but loyal audience for her electronically tinged folk music—genre labels be damned.
For her next album, Missa pivoted again, exploring Brazilian music with the help of Jun Kagami, guitarist of Xacara. Friends Of Yours featured her most personal songs yet—like “行き先は未定” and “春の光”—sparsely produced and emotionally raw. Even then, songs like “ねじ,” dressed in skewed electronics, showed she wasn’t finished merging traditions.
On 1999’s Darkness & Snow, she carried these minimal ideas further. Drawing from jazz and healing music, she recorded in a warmer, band-based setting. Songs like “ドロップ” and “真夏のアスファルト” delivered yearning emotion, captured on analog tape.
Then came Festa Manifesto. A cleansing, a closing of the circle. Maybe it marked the end of an era, or a reaffirmation of her artistic purpose. Naturally, Hajime returned—now wiser and more adventurous—and together, they launched a sonic voyage that spanned the ancient and the eternal.
Racing to finish before the new millennium, they released this “festival manifesto” eight months after Darkness & Snow. And with “砂時計 -View- (Sunadokei -View-)”, they showed exactly what they meant: something from “a long long time ago into the future…”
Leaning into Hajime’s esoteric ambient and techno palette, Missa injected a deep humanity into that starry-eyed electronic space. If Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” tore into modern life with the coldness of Apple’s Speech Manager, Missa’s “砂時計 -View-” offered a counterpoint: “Delete. Guard.” Yet amid the despair, Tetsuya Saito’s accordion and Missa’s voice introduced a wrinkle—hope.
On accessible songs like “ダークネス & スノウ (Darkness & Snow),” she treated light and dark as binary code—music pitter-pattering in tantric time, memory fragmented and reframed. Jazz bassist Hiroshi Yoshino added weight to the title track, based on a poem by Mimiyo Tomozawa. The blend of ancient songcraft and contemporary production was seamless.
Haunting, ethereal tracks like “パルス (Pulse)” infused sorrow with the cry of Jia Peng-Fang’s erhu—equal parts avant-garde and avant-pop. “ユリの丘 (Yuri No Oka)” perfected that elusive “future folk” aesthetic. “おいしい水 (Oishi Mizu)” transformed Jobim’s “Água De Beber” into fluorescent Dotonbori electro-pop.
Digging into Japanese literary tradition, Missa pulled poetry from Yumeji Takehisa and hurled it into a techno-glitched “Taisho Romanticism” of the future. “ソラリス (Solaris)” floated between IDM and art-pop, trying to escape gravity. “f.m.” echoed Morse, tracing some new Morse code between past, present, and future.
Introspective dance music starts to wind down the record, like a quiet final act. Introspective dance music starts to wind down the record with songs like “オモイダス (Omoidasu)”. By the time the closing track “未来 (Mirai)” arrives, a sense of spiritual meditation emerges. ““Sometimes I remember words, that aren’t words, just a little lullaby”…”Sometimes I remember, those words, those small…” Missa lingers, trailing that thought without an end, over the album’s purest moment of fleeting stillness—her voice, vulnerable, and full of wonder not quite knowing how to say with words what music can more fully express.
Festa Manifesto was meant to be the conclusion of the Fukuma Universe Tetralogy. In some ways, it is. Missa put her music on pause after its release, releasing a record of more mainstream and accessible music, only to remarry, move to America, and give birth to her first child (effectively, retiring from music to raise a growing family). Then in January 2022 we’d lose her brother to an aneurysm, closing any return to her close kin and spirit. In the end, Missa chose to not return to this scale of ambition–perhaps because the work completed her most ambitious idea.
It’s a record that could feel buried, not just in obscurity but deep within time itself. However, its saving grace is a code. It’s a code that still runs—quietly, beautifully—waiting to be deciphered for those (like me or perhaps, you) who pick up its signal. Living on in fragments, appropriately, it whispers that maybe, just maybe, we still have time left to flip the hourglass (and the sands of time) on her music.
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