This piece is fictional, composed in the spirit of her legacy, as no extensive English-language interview with Maki Tomoda is widely available.
She tilts her head. “A legend is a tombstone. I am still gardening.” maki tomoda interview
Maki Tomoda laughs. It is a dry, rustling sound, like autumn leaves scraping pavement. This piece is fictional, composed in the spirit
She speaks of her years as a session musician in Los Angeles in the late 80s, where she was told to anglicize her name to "Mandy." She refused. She was fired from three sessions in one week. She recounts this not with bitterness, but with a kind of anthropological curiosity, as if describing the mating habits of a strange, lesser-evolved species. I am still gardening
“I would tell her,” she says finally, looking not at the journalist, but at a rain-streaked window overlooking Shibuya, “that being difficult is not the same as being true. But also… that being liked is overrated. The goal is not to be understood. The goal is to be recognizable —so that the one person who needs to find you, can.”
Maki Tomoda passed away two years later, surrounded by analog synthesizers and blooming cherry blossoms. Her garden, as it turns out, was full of vegetables for the local food bank.
What unfolds in the next hour is not a typical promotional junket. It is a masterclass in artistic integrity. She refuses to discuss the "lost masterpiece" as a relic. Instead, she talks about the nuclear accident in Fukushima. She talks about the unauthorized use of a pop song at a political rally in 1984—a protest she led that got her blacklisted from NHK for seven years. She pulls out a worn notebook filled with phonetic transcriptions of Ainu folk songs, her current obsession.