Words Alive2021

A vivid account of life on the margins and Tokyo's 1970s underground culture from a Japanese folk legend A memoir by Kawasaki-based writer and musician Kazuki Tomokawa (born 1950), Try Saying You're Alive! offers a semi-fictionalized account of the vibrant Tokyo underground that he has been at the center of since the 1970s. Recounting 40 years in the life of this "screaming philosopher," Try Saying You're Alive! traces Tomokawa's early life in the Akita Prefecture as a "runaway toddler," his adolescent basketball career, and his wanderings as a day laborer, gambler, painter, actor, drinker and avant-garde folk guitarist. Anecdotes of figures such as novelist Kenji Nakagami, poet Shuji Terayama, actor Tôru Yuri, directors Takashi Miike and Nagisa O?shima, and musicians Ryudo Uzaki and Kan Mikami animate this impassioned memoir by a legendary musician. This is the first English translation of Tomokawa's writing and it coincides with Blank Forms' reissue of his first three albums: Finally, His First Album (1975), Straight from the Throat (1976) and A String of Paper Cranes Clenched Between My Teeth (1977).