I’ll be the first to admit this: sometimes the story doesn’t write itself–until it does.
It was moons ago when I first encountered Mitsu’s 水の彩 (Clouds In The Water). One mellow night, walking alongside Kyoto’s impressive Kamo River, I gave in to a thought lingering in the back of my head. In better spirits, I told myself, if I’ve come this far, why not try once more to visit Kyoto’s equally impressive Meditations record store, located just two stone’s throw from the Kamogawa? I was nearing the end of my time in the city, and if not now, when?
It was while browsing Meditations’ record collection that I pulled 水の彩 (Clouds In The Water) from the shelf. Drawn in by its spartan, minimalist album design and textured surface, it stood apart from the rest. Sound unheard, I asked the ever-helpful clerk if she could play a sample. As we talked about other music I was interested in, the fragments of this wonderful record drifting in the background became an unforgettable soundtrack to our conversation. In its own way, it punctuated my night.
Back then, what little I knew about the record’s provenance came from the shop. It boiled down to this: a rare deadstock album from Sendai composer Mitsuhiro Sakakibara, capturing a forgotten pocket of Japanese ambient jazz. For a long time, the modest story attached to it felt dwarfed by the impression it left on me.
Thankfully, today there are waypoints that allow me to begin sharing that story. One of them begins in Sendai itself.
If you ever find yourself in Sendai at JR East’s Aoba-dōri Station, contemplating life in all its vagaries–or simply waiting for the next train bound for Ishinomaki–you’ve probably heard Mitsuhiro’s most famous claim to fame drifting through the speakers. Announcing departures is the melody of “青葉城恋唄 (Aoba Castle Love Song),” an excerpt from the iconic melancholic tune that quite literally put the Tohoku region on Japan’s musical map.
Originally written by Mitsuhiro for Muneyuki Sato, its blend of graceful longing and refreshing melody made such an impression that it became, in effect, a “local song” for a city that had never really had one. Remarkably, when Mitsu wrote it in 1977, he was just twenty years old–a fresh-faced composer driven by his first love: music.
Mitsuhiro’s story both begins and continues in Sendai. As a boy who couldn’t afford a piano at home, he would stay after school to play the free piano there. He practiced what he later called his “little bird chord”–a compact shape played with three fingers of the right hand, using only the white keys. He practiced obsessively, teaching himself, growing into a prodigious pianist who would eventually perform in local bands. Even while studying mechanical engineering at Tohoku University, he never abandoned music.
His life shifted when he performed as a backup musician for Muneyuki Sato while still in college. It was Sato who recognized the power of that small melody Mitsuhiro had been playing during rehearsal. When Mitsu decided to pursue music seriously, he followed his muse to America, enrolling at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. There, he outpaced his classmates, graduating in two years cum laude and earning the prestigious Oscar Peterson Award. His time in America–scraping together tuition and navigating the country alone–instilled in him a sense of openness and freedom unfamiliar to those who remained at home.
When Mitsuhiro returned to Sendai after Berklee, he was determined to chart a different path for his city. Inspired by Boston’s public performance culture, he worked closely as Sendai’s music director to cultivate its festivals and music scene. Major open-air events like the Sendai Aoba Matsuri and the Jozenji Street Jazz Festival–free gatherings where anyone can enjoy live music–required someone willing to sort through the practical realities. Mitsuhiro was that person.
During this period, his love of jazz, folk, and environmental music informed compositions such as Symphonic Poem Sendai: Mori / Tayuto Toki no Oto (Sound of Floating Time) for the Miyagi Prefectural Museum of Art, as well as intimate piano performances at Cafe Procope in Sendai. In hindsight, the only thing left was to commit to tape the full range of influences his life had gathered.
You could say that 水の彩 (Clouds In The Water), recorded and privately pressed in 1989, was inevitable. By then, Mitsuhiro had spent years composing interstitial and commercial music for Japanese broadcasters. Sharp-eared listeners may have recognized the melody of the opening track, “水紀行 (Mizukikou),” from NHK’s Water Journey. Though known publicly as a promoter and jazz musician, his own music leaned toward the impressionistic–its influences difficult to pin down.
That same year, as he reimagined “Aoba Castle Love Song” into a more ephemeral ambient form for JR East using synthesizers, he also recorded these six pieces with a quartet he called the Cheshire Cats: reedist Tomohiko Yasuda, bassist Tatsuya Sakimura, and drummer Seiki Kumagai–local Sendai jazz musicians whose histories are, sadly, largely undocumented, as far as I can see.
Born of a quiet ecological awareness that had long stirred within him, 水の彩 (Clouds In The Water) impresses with its airy fusion of jazz modalities and environmental sensibilities. The natural segue from the searching, modal “水紀行 (Mizukikou)” to the impressionistic “マヤ (First Light),” a piano solo accented by field recordings, is unforgettable. The floating atmosphere of “踊る妖精 (A Dancing Fairy)”–with its longform, ECM-like ambient jazz textures–feels like part of a larger, unseen landscape.
This is a record that draws you in with a depth that belies its quiet surface. Beneath those still waters churns the indigo turbulence of the title track, “水の彩 (Clouds In The Water),” a wide-open freeform arrangement that fully inhabits its tone-poem abstraction.
Limiting itself to six tracks sharpens Mitsuhiro’s scope. “ワンダーランドスケープ (Wonderlandscape)” shifts the mood into something less dreamy, more mercurial and vibrant. And the album closes with the funky jazz propulsion of “サイド・バイ・サイド (Side By Side),” far removed from where it began. Sophisticated, cool, and unpretentiously understated, this little-heard statement–perhaps a love letter to his native Sendai–embodies both the quiet charm of that under-heralded city and the brilliance of one of its under-recognized visionaries.
You see, way back when, as I stood somewhere in Japan’s overly-stated capital of quiet cool, hearing this music fill the air and shape a perfect night, I had no idea it would linger in my memory. I didn’t yet know it would send my thoughts traveling elsewhere–or that it belonged somewhere specific, elsewhere. In that moment, a stone’s throw was all my world required, and 水の彩 (Clouds In The Water) somehow braided itself into memories of the Kamogawa.
Now, Mitsuhiro’s inspiration is the story I hope to keep following and perhaps someday get closer to its tributary.
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