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At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyos Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single a€?Try Saying Youre Alive!,a€? written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this recording that introduced Japan to one of its most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record label exec Kiichi Takahara writes in the LPs liner notes (here translated for the first time), is not a song but a a€?flesh-and-blood human being,a€? birthed by the singer-songwriter and the raw, guttural cries that would become a hallmark of his incomparable sound. 1970s Japan was a time and place marked by a profound desire for authenticity amidst the onset of television and media saturation. Tomokawa arrived on the scene as a musician witha€?the personality of a hydrogen bomb,a€? to borrow a phrase from his frequent collaborator Toshi Ishizuka. In an unwieldy interview included here, members of the notorious leftist band Zun? Keisatsu (Brain Police) put it bluntly: here was a man surrounded by the a€?disingenuous,a€? the a€?wishy-washy,a€? and the a€?superficial,a€? who was delivering a€?real life, unvarnished.a€? These songs are lullabies for the lost, staring not into the void buta€'as the fourth track declaresa€'from inside it. Finally, His First Album is the first of three Tomokawa records to be reissued by Blank Forms Editions in conjunction with the US release of Tomokawas memoir, Try Saying Youre Alive!, the first-ever English translation of his writing. This debut captures the self-assured trademarks that Tomokawa would hone over the course of decades. Multiple tracks are performed in his native Akita dialect, a distinct and highly regional vernacular of northern Japan seldom heard outside the prefecturea€'and even more rarely heard in music. Tomokawas lyrics locate profound interiority in the rituals of everyday life, and are sung against sparse folk arrangements of tender, lilting chordsa€'a prelude to the rock and electronic stylings to come in later years. A self-proclaimed a€?living corpse,a€? Tomokawa wallows, whispers, shouts, and cries, yet still, through his existential doubt, asks to be heard.