Shozin Fukui died.
Last year I planned to expand this blog into a long form interview-style program that Fukui would moderate. He was very excited about it, even offering to open the bar on the one day of the week they take off to make it happen. Then he got sick and then he died.
Before I knew about Shozin Fukui the ‘avant garde cyberpunk film director,’ I knew him as the nice bartender I got along with; I never once called him Fukui-san, and to this day I only ever call him master (what you call bartenders in Japanese). How we met is just as benign:
A friend of mine was a fan of his and asked if I could accompany him to his bar, and I agreed. We didn’t even know if the man called Shozin Fukui would be there, because the website said something like he “produced” the bar, which we thought maybe meant he was some kind of owner-sometimes-customer-type-deal. I had heard the name before in relation to people like Shinya Tsukamoto, who I really like, so I figured it would be interesting enough whether or not he was actually there. We ventured to the odd part of town; I was still new to Japan; it was something like my second month. I was pretty good at understanding the language, but I wasn’t so used to speaking it so it still took the kind of courage that comes from timidly sipping beers in the bar, which is being tended to by an older married couple. There’s some splatter house movie on the TV, and something like Mogwai is probably blasting through the speaker.
In the haze of smoke and music and alcohol, the small bar becomes crowded and people work their way over to us to ask how we found it in the first place. I explain that my friend heard a film director he likes is involved with the bar, and they laugh and call the bartender over—it’s him, apparently.
We explain we are students and fans of movies of his kind, not to mention the music he likes and his sense of decor. He laughs and says it happens every now and again, but that I’m the first time he’s ever been able to have a conversation with one of these foreign fans that come waltzing in chasing the legend. Every now and again someone will come in and stumble through a Google Translated conversation to say how much they like his work, and all they can really do is smile and tend bar; at least in our case we were nervous but could talk without a smartphone between us.
That was the last time my friend ever went there, but it was the second time I went that turned me into a kind of regular. On another day months later I happened to be in the area and took a friend there, and when I walked in both Fukui and his wife remembered my name, the school I went to, everything, because they took a genuine interest in me which was new and exciting for someone with little to no relations in a foreign country at that time.
After that he became a constant figure in my life, and at some point between then and when he asked to exchange contact information I suppose at one point he stopped being just a bartender but a real and earnest friend. Fukui was the first reader of the Japanese version of this blog, and the first owner of it in book form. He helped me with all the forms necessary to sell it in stores, and was always so proud of my work and all the work the regulars would bring in. I remember him sitting behind the counter, ignoring customers while reading my book and exclaiming sugoi! every few minutes when he read something he thought was interesting.
I’ve met people who are now dear friends just because they sat next to me in those hard wooden seats. I’ve had thrillingly strange conversations with old, drunk Japanese men who couldn’t tell you the difference between cyberpunk and body horror. I’ve watched so many movies on mute while Boards of Canada plays in the background there. All the while Fukui was always across the bar, laughing along whenever he’d hear something funny. He would meet every single person with respect and care, always present and eager to listen.
I took everyone I knew there. I took my close friends from Canada there, my sister, too. Fukui Shozin witnessed every corner of my life right across the bar, for better or for worse; the bad and the good, the sober and the sloppy.
“See anything good lately?” I’d ask.
“I’m rewatching Gundam,” he said.
“Really? Like the original?”
“Yeah, now that I’m an old man I thought maybe I’d feel differently about it.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. Even when I watch Evangelion I always feel the same,” he laughs. “I think I’m just a boy forever.”
“I’m excited to hear what you think!”
“Thanks! Actually, your book made me think it was time I go back to it, too.”
I think I probably blushed or something. I brought him my copy of Beltorchika’s Children to read afterward, which he said he would rewatch the original series, Zeta, and ZZ to read the book.
We exchanged recommendations like this often: I brought him Turkish progressive rock CDs when I went to Istanbul over the summer; he once gave me a DVD of the Dustin Hoffman movie Straw Dogs that I had trouble finding. The last thing I brought him was a Turkish evil eye when I found out he had been hospitalized.
And the six months between then and the announcement of his death, I kept thinking about how he was still right in the middle of Zeta Gundam when it all went down; would he be able to finish it? I just kept hoping he would get better so we could talk about Gundam one more time, because that’s all I ever wanted to do, just one more time.
“Cyberpunk masterpiece 964 Pinocchio.”
“Step into the twisted mind of obscure Japanese punk film legend Shozin Fukui.”
“An unhinged Japanese cyberpunk flick.”
“A subterranean mindfuck.”
“Weird, batshit extreme cinema.”
“964 Pinocchio: Bonkers Japanese Cyberpunk WTFery.”
“The Most Insane Movie You Should NEVER Watch.”
All of the above are quotations from and titles of YouTube videos about the work of Shozin Fukui.
People often use all sorts of words like this to describe the work of artists at a superficial level, because of course they do. If an average person was asked to describe the contents of 964 Pinocchio, they would probably only be able to say: loud, offensive, much screaming, too much vomit, etc., and a genre enthusiast would probably say words like: cyberpunk, horror, punk, guerilla, totally freaking messed up. But if you were to ask me what words I would use to describe that movie they would be only: love, kindness, joy, and so on and so forth, because these are the only things I ever knew Fukui for.
I have no issue with the people who don’t look at these movies because of the sensory issues, but I do take fault with so-called genre enthusiasts who gratuitously hype up shit like gore and body horror or whatever and each movie they watch is in competition to be the most seriously fucked up of them all. It’s a more egregious refusal to engage with the work than just ignoring it entirely it is, I think, and it’s exactly the kind of person who revels in othering people like Fukui as freak artists.
But then the most famous scene in Pinocchio is when the titular character runs through the streets of Tokyo at full speed, chained up and bloodied. So much of the movie is filmed in public and none of these scenes were taken with permission; the reactions of everyone around him are real. It’s ostensibly done to “get a reaction” out of people, but it’s also done in a desperate plea of: look at me. Anyone who has felt out of place in the world will identify with that, and it’s not like they’re just making a ruckus on the streets just to do it--Rubber’s Lover, Fukui’s other feature, is almost entirely on sound stages. Pinocchio is deliberate, it’s aching, it’s bursting at the seams with a need to love and be loved, and every single character on the screen is at odds with each other to show that their love is correct and true, the same way the movie is fighting you, the viewer, too.
I say “fighting,” because there was a period last summer Fukui was showing all of his movies at a theatre in Shinjuku where he personally mixed the audio of every single showing himself, live in the back of the room. It was the most ear-piercing, painful, and all-around loud thing I have ever seen, ever, and I’ve seen a lot of loud music. Afterward when he greeted me outside the theatre and asked what I thought with a grin on his face, I could only smile and tell him I loved it, because I did, and that proud grin showed he had no ill intention, just fun.
“You really are a genius, master,” I said. These would end up being the last words I ever spoke to him.
I believed it, too. He used to have these nights at the bar where he would hook up a plethora of video synthesizers to the TV and load up his own movies, then mess with them in unison to some crazy industrial track he wrote with a buddy. The synthesizers were very cerebrally-designed, reacting to subtle hand movements and gestures, and the physicality of it would build tension in its own way; eventually Fukui would be doing a little dance. When I mentioned it to him after, he’d get embarrassed and say he didn’t even notice.
Each time I watched him do his thing I realized this guy is the real deal; it has nothing to do with creating a tradition of cyberpunk or wanting to contribute to a genre, to him he did it because it’s what came as naturally to him as the dance, that his body and mind moved him in that direction and those movies were made as pure expressions of someone totally in love with the act of living. There is nothing cynical or scary or exploitative about any movie he made; they are all about love.
I felt compelled to write this eulogy because I wanted it to be known that Fukui was a kind, warmhearted person with nothing but respect for the world. Art ‘critics’ like to frame people like him or Tsukamoto or Ishii and so on as avant garde freaks, but these people feel more than any of us, and the extreme images in their work are just one manifestation of that.
I still have not really rationalized the fact that he is dead. The practical explanation my brain keeps understanding his death with is this: I can’t meet him anymore. That’s it—I just can’t talk to or meet him, but that’s not necessarily true. He’s in his films, he’s at the bar, he’s in this post, he’s in all our hearts.
June 8th, 2026