me and hikki

At the very end of last year, I had been sequestered in the small bedroom in my father’s condo that I have lived in for some eighteen years, wearing masks whenever I was in our public spaces of the kitchen and the hallway between our bedrooms and dropping off meals at his door which he sometimes took hours to retrieve. Every so often, I would hear him shift around on the bed through the shared wall connecting our rooms. Each day felt even more and more alienating as I listened to my father cough and wheeze through the walls. I stayed in that bedroom, with a view of Highway 401, for ten days before I took my father to the hospital for his pain. He has since recovered, but driving him to the hospital and seeing him hunched over in the backseat, nearly unconscious is an image that I will not ever forget.

At some point in those ten days, I watched Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, the last film in Anno Hideaki’s twenty-six-year surrealist postmodern anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Watching this conclusion of a series so firmly rooted in themes of isolation and human connection felt incredibly cathartic but perhaps no moment affected me so much as the very ending, when I watched the ultimate fates of these long-loved characters open to possibility over mellow and subdued synthesizers that made way to a familiar voice that echoed across time – that of Utada Hikaru, an American-born Japanese singer who is one of Japan’s most successful singers of all time.

It was a voice uncannily familiar to me and at once, I was taken back almost exactly twenty years – to a night when I stayed up far later than a child my age should have stayed up so that I could watch my father defeat the final boss in the very first Kingdom Hearts game. We used to play together often after my grandparents and sister had gone to sleep, sneaking downstairs so that I could play through the exploratory and rudimentary battle portions while handing off the controller to him for the more difficult parts. It’s a series that remains firmly embedded in my memories of my childhood and my father and I will always remember hearing Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean” over the final cutscene.

Disparate memories of Utada echo throughout my life, both these and others – playing the second Kingdom Hearts game with my brother, downloading a playlist of their songs onto my phone for a month-long trip to China, hearing a piano rendition of their songs playing in the bathrooms of sushi restaurants, listening to their First Love album with a doomed lover on a rainy day in Kyoto. I am fond of Utada as long as I am fond of myself.

Celebrating twenty years since the launch of Kingdom Hearts, twenty seven years since the premiere of Neon Genesis Evangelion and myself, and one day since Utada’s performance at Coachella last night, here is a playlist of my favourite Utada Hikaru songs.