The Drug Tokyo Never Lets You Kick

Everyone who has walked through Harajuku at midnight—past the neon-lit storefronts and the teenagers dressed like they’re auditioning for a Miyazaki film—knows what Tokyo does to you. Akihabara with its floors of components and figures and objects you don’t yet have words for. The narrow backstreets of Kamimachi where the city goes quiet and smells like damp wood and something frying nearby. You go once and it installs itself as a recurring problem, a place you return to in your head even when you’re somewhere entirely different. I’ve been hooked for years and I still don’t have a cure.

Kutiman’s Thru Tokyo captures something about that feeling that most travel photography misses. His method is to build music from found footage—YouTube clips, street recordings, fragments of amateur performance—stitched into something that works simultaneously as a track and as a portrait of a city. The result is Tokyo as frequency: subway announcement voices, pachinko machine noise, a guitarist in an underpass, someone beatboxing near Shibuya crossing. It shouldn’t cohere, but it does, the same way the city itself shouldn’t function and relentlessly does.

Watching it restarted the particular itch—the one that only a flight to Narita actually treats.