When the Music Became the Story

Last week, one of my new acquaintances invited me to a monthly gathering that I’d heard about but never actually joined: ten to fifteen people meet for a few hours, listen to one genre of music picked fresh each month, and talk through its history, its artists, its songs, over snacks and drinks. They’ve been doing this for about a year. This month’s genre was bossa nova, and I had a genuinely great time.

The conversation naturally kept drifting into film. Someone brought up Black Orpheus, the 1959 movie that introduced much of the world to bossa nova in the first place, and from there into Ryuichi Sakamoto, who spent decades of his own composing career expressing love toward Brazilian music. It got me thinking about how much work good films about music can do, and that we had never actually built a section around films where music itself is the subject rather than just the score.

So this week: three films where music is the main character, and a Music section that is about bossa nova made in Asia.

— Yubin

Jay Chou was already one of the best-selling, most awarded pop stars in the Chinese-speaking world when he decided, at 28, to write, direct, score, and star in his own film. Secret casts him as Ye Xianglun, a piano prodigy who transfers to a school where his father teaches (Tamkang High School), which is also Chou’s actual alma mater. He then falls for Lu Xiaoyu (played by Gwei Lun-mei), a fellow pianist who keeps disappearing without explanation. The reason surfaces slowly: she can travel through time by playing a mysterious piece called “Secret” on an antique piano in the school’s practice building, with a cruel catch — she can only be seen by the first person she encounters after each jump.

The time-travel plot has some logical gaps, and critics were split on Chou’s acting even while praising Gwei Lun-mei’s. What makes the film worth watching is the music. Chou built the piano pieces around real Chopin music, including the “Black Key” Etude, and wrote the title song himself; it went on to win Best Original Song at the Golden Horse Awards alongside Outstanding Taiwanese Film. He’s said that the story draws loosely on his own adolescence: how he remembers the atmosphere of the school, the piano room, and a crush he had on someone.

Secret made back more than ten times its budget and has since been remade twice, a Japanese version in 2024 and a Korean one, Secret: Untold Melody, in 2025. This says something about how durable this exact premise, two teenagers, one piano, one love beyond time, actually is.

Stream on iQIYI, Netflix/Apple TV (in Asia) (Trailer)

Blue Giant (ブルージャイアント) — Yuzuru Tachikawa (Japan, 2023)

Blue Giant is an anime adaptation of Shinichi Ishizuka’s manga (over 10 million copies in print), following the main character Dai Miyamoto, a self-taught saxophonist from Sendai. Dai moves from his hometown to Tokyo and claws his way into the city’s jazz scene with a trio he forms almost by accident. What makes it stand out isn’t the animation itself, criticized at release for stiff CGI during the performance scenes, but who’s actually playing underneath it: jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, a major figure in the Japanese jazz scene, served as music director and performs the piano score herself, while saxophonist Tomoaki Baba and drummer Shun Ishiwaka play the instrument for their characters. The film sold over 690,000 tickets in Japan and crossed a billion yen at the box office. A must-watch for fans of jazz music or anime or both.

Stream on Netflix (Trailer)

Rock On!! — Abhishek Kapoor (India, 2008)

Magik, a Mumbai rock band, wins a record deal in 1998 and breaks up soon after once the label starts cutting their songs down into something more marketable. Ten years later, frontman Aditya (Farhan Akhtar, in his acting debut) is an unhappy investment banker; his wife reconnects him with his old bandmates, and the reunion gathers real stakes once it becomes clear that Rob, the band’s guitarist, is dying of a brain tumor and wants one more show. The soundtrack, composed by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, sold over a million copies and became one of the year’s best-selling albums in India; the film itself won two National Film Awards and seven Filmfare Awards, and was popular enough to get a sequel eight years later with the same cast. It’s a familiar shape — reunion, redemption, one last gig, but it’s a rare Bollywood rock film that pushes its music to carry real feeling rather than just the plot.

Stream on Netflix (Trailer)

Sadao Watanabe had spent years as one of Japan’s most prominent jazz saxophonists when he enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1962, a stint that put him directly in the path of the bossa nova wave rolling out of Brazil at the time. He came home and spent the rest of the decade recording an unusually dense run of bossa-inflected albums in quick succession, Jazz Samba, Bossa Nova ‘67, Jazz & Bossa, before Sadao Meets Brazilian Friends in 1968, recorded with an eight-piece Brazilian ensemble and widely credited as one of the records that properly introduced the genre to Japanese listeners.

What’s remarkable is that the connection never faded into a one-off trend. Watanabe kept returning to Brazilian music for the rest of his career, eventually recording across four decades with some of Brazil’s own most important musicians — guitarist Toquinho, pianist Cesar Camargo Mariano, and guitarist Romero Lubambo among them, on albums like Viajando (1998) and Minha Saudade (2001). In 2015, Brazil’s government awarded him the Order of Rio Branco, a national honor in recognition of that lifelong relationship. Watanabe has released more than seventy albums as a leader across six decades; this album is where that specific thread of his career actually begins, long before it became a decades-long, genuinely reciprocated friendship between Watanabe and bossa nova.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Casa — Morelenbaum²/Sakamoto (2001)

This album is a direct tribute to Antônio Carlos Jobim, the composer most responsible for bossa nova’s existence, recorded largely inside Jobim’s own house in Rio de Janeiro, on his own grand piano, by cellist Jaques Morelenbaum, singer Paula Morelenbaum, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The arrangements strip Jobim’s songs down to something closer to chamber music than bossa nova; the New York Times and Billboard both named it one of the year’s best records, and one reviewer noted that Sakamoto’s chords on “Sabiá” echo Chopin. Sakamoto, already familiar to Oblique readers from Issue 07’s async album, spent much of his career drawn back to Brazilian music, and this is the clearest evidence of why.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Vol. 1 — Kim Hyun-chul (Korea, 1989)

Kim Hyun-chul was a college freshman in Korea, already locally known for home-recorded demos that had sold over a thousand copies through word of mouth, when Dong-A Records signed him and released his debut album. “Train to Chuncheon,” its bossa-nova-tinged lead track, became the record’s breakout hit and helped mark Kim as a driving force in Korea’s late-1980s “fusion gayo” movement alongside acts like Spring Summer Autumn Winter. Kim later called the album “riddled with flaws,” but a 2018 critics’ poll ranked it twelfth among the best Korean pop albums of the decade, and Light in the Attic’s reissue series has since brought it back into circulation.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Shin Noguchi has spent about twenty years based in Kamakura, working the streets there and in Tokyo under a specific rule: no staged scenes, no shooting from the hip, no photographing without actually looking through the viewfinder. Everything in his frame has to be seen deliberately, in the moment it happens. That discipline shows in the work itself, images that feel observed rather than captured, built from a contemplative attention to ordinary public and private life.

In Color in Japan, his 2020 debut photobook published by Eyeshot, gathers around 130 of these images with an introduction by Chuck Patch, released as a limited, signed edition of 500 copies. The photographs don’t lean on Japan’s usual visual elements — no neon signage framed for effect, no cherry blossoms. They’re closer to the texture of an ordinary day: a reflection folding into a shop window, a child’s posture mid-run, the specific quality of light falling across a street at a specific hour. Noguchi has said his subjects “tell me the meaning and value of life,” and that photographing them is as much an act of affirming their existence as his own.

His work has traveled well beyond Japan without much fanfare: features in The Guardian, Libération, and Die Zeit, inclusion in two of David Gibson’s international street photography anthologies, a national prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, a first-prize finish at France’s Prix Talents in 2014. Check him out if you’re fan of street photography.

Follow his work on his website and IG @shinnoguchiphotos

The Eurovision Song Contest has been running since May 24, 1956, when the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), formed after World War II specifically to unite European public broadcasters, used it to test something new: live, simultaneous television broadcasting across national borders, modeled loosely on Italy’s Sanremo festival. Seven countries competed that first year. It has since grown into one of the largest recurring media events in the world, a contest that pushed broadcasting technology forward for decades (color television, early HD tests) and now generates billions of YouTube views every year. The EBU floated the idea of an Asia-Pacific version as early as 2008, under the name Our Sound; it kept falling through, got revived and shelved again by Australia’s SBS in the 2010s, and quietly died more than once.

This November 14, on the Contest’s 70th anniversary, it’s finally happening. Eurovision Song Contest Asia holds its first-ever grand final in Bangkok, with eleven countries competing: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. It runs on the same rules as the original, a jury and public vote split evenly, songs capped at three minutes, six performers max onstage, with one addition unique to this edition: a “Rest of the World” online vote open to anyone watching outside the region. The winner doesn’t get a spot in the main contest, but a guest performance slot at Eurovision 2027 in Bulgaria. It remains to be seen whether the format will become successful beyond Europe.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com