A Japanese folk legend rides again

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By the time Japan’s Underground Record Club released Sachiko Kanenobu’s debut album Misora in 1972, the Osaka-born singer-songwriter was already gone. Decamping to Northern California with her then-fiancé, the American music journalist and Crawdaddy! magazine creator Paul Williams, she effectively retired from music for a decade to focus on raising their two children. Unpromoted, the album quickly fell into obscurity.

The act of leaving Misora behind before its proper release was like abandoning a child, Kanenobu told KQED in 2019, months after Light in the Attic gave the album its first official U.S. release. It had been a battle to record the project in the first place: The overwhelmingly male staff of URC, one of Japan’s first independent labels, were skeptical of Kanenobu’s ability to sell records as a solo artist and only agreed to back Misora once Haruomi Hosono, a future founding member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, signed on as its producer. 50 years later, the album counts Jim O’Rourke, Steve Gunn, Wim Wenders, Devendra Banhart, Parquet Courts, and Yo La Tengo among its acolytes.

Listening back to Misora in 2024, the album’s genius is undeniable. Its opener and title track, a halting acoustic ballad, immediately evokes the early work of Joni Mitchell. But there’s a strange, deeply forlorn quality to her delivery that’s more akin to the wilder, more instinctual music Sybille Baier was making at home in rural Germany around the same time, for no one but herself and her family. And “Aoi Sakana,” a mid-album cut that’s found a global fan base after featuring in Wenders’s 2023 film Perfect Days, rings with the jaunty country-rock confidence of Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac.

Kanenobu returned to music as the ’70s rolled into the ’80s, partly due to encouragement from Philip K. Dick, whom she’d befriended through her husband. Dick planned to fund Misora’s follow-up, but the project evaporated when he died suddenly in early 1982. Kanenobu and Williams divorced the same year.

Later in the ’80s, Kanenobu went on to lead a rock band called Culture Shock, recording with the group through the early ’90s. She continued to release her own music sporadically in the ensuing years while working with California’s In-Home Support Services as a caretaker for clients with disorders such as dementia, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis. According to her KQED interview, she retired from that position on the day of Misora’s American release.

Last October, Temporal Drift released a rerecording of a 1999 Sachiko Kanenobu album titled Fork in the Road. Produced by Makoto Kubota — a member of Les Rallizes Denudes who has been working to rerelease the legendary Kyoto noise-rock outfit’s long-bootlegged albums in studio quality for the past few years — the reimagined record also features Steve Gunn, Carwyn Ellis, and members of the recently dissolved Tokyo psych-rock group Kikagaku Moyo.

Fork in the Road is a lovely collection of songs, including feats of songwriting like the ingeniously eerie “Strange Melody” and the quietly anthemic “Take Me to the Ocean,” and surprising acts of rogue production like the bluesy slide guitar on “I Saw the Sunset” and the shimmering sitar that pops up throughout the album. Vibrant and stylistically diverse, it’s both a celebration of Kanenobu’s career and a demonstration of her continued vitality and varied taste at 76.

The album concludes with a 1970 demo of “Misora,” overdubbed and electrified in 1984. Over insistent, repetitive hand-struck percussion and chintzy yet majestic synths, Kanenobu’s voice glows joyfully from the past, pulled from obscurity into the here and now.

A vinyl reissue of Fork in the Road arrived via Temporal Drift last month. Sahicko Kanenobu will play four northeast shows — her first since 2019 — starting October 5 at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia.