Try Saying Youre Alive!: Kazuki Tomokawa in His Own Words [Paperback]

A vivid account of life on the margins and Tokyos 1970s underground culture from a Japanese folk legend

Tokyo in the 1970s was a magnet for young musicians, poets and painters. Among them was Kazuki Tomokawa, a prolific singer-songwriter from Japans northern provinces, whose guttural vocals and incisive lyrics earned him the unofficial title of screaming philosopher.
The stories in this memoiroriginally published in 2015 in Japan and now appearing as the first English translation of Tomokawas writingare told with a ramblers wit and wisdom, bringing together his memorable reflections on six decades of day labor, drinking, gambling, acting, singing and writing. Figures such as Kan Mikami, Nobuyoshi Araki and Shkji Terayama drift through this down-and-out vagabonds memoir, which observes the turbulence of postwar countercultures and the explosion of Tokyos underground film and music scenes.
Also available from Blank Forms Editions are Kazuki Tomokawas first three records: Finally, His First Album(1975), Straight From the Throat(1976) and A String of Paper Cranes Clenched Between My Teeth(1977).
Kazuki Tomokawa(born 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryk Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his debut in 1974, he has released more than 30 albums. He is additionally known as a poet, painter, keirinenthusiast and inimitable drinker. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning 40 years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon(2014) and Gleaming Crayon(2016), both on the Modest Launch label.