On July 11, Nippon Columbia releases the original soundtrack to the TV anime Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table (Shibou Yugi de Meshi wo Kuu). A two-disc set with 41 tracks planned, catalog number COCX-42658-9, priced at 4,180 yen (tax included). The composer is Junichi Matsumoto. Seeing that name, listeners probably split cleanly into two camps: "Ah, that guy," and "Who?" It is the second camp who ought to hear this album.

Because Matsumoto occupies an unusually strange position among Japan's working score composers.

A Film Composer Still Competing at the Front Line of Contemporary Music

Junichi Matsumoto was born in 1973 in Kushiro, Hokkaido. He graduated from the composition department of Kunitachi College of Music, and later studied for a master's degree in composition at the Iceland University of the Arts. So far, this reads as "a contemporary-music guy." What makes his career remarkable is that he never left that front line.

In 2011 he received the Finalist Prize in the composition category of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition. He took second place in the composition category of the 91st Japan Music Competition and was nominated for the Akutagawa Suntory Award for Music Composition. Then, at the 93rd Japan Music Competition, he took first place outright. The composition category of the Japan Music Competition is arguably the most severe gateway in Japanese contemporary music. The person who wins it is, the following season, writing background music for a death-game anime. The range here is, to put it mildly, abnormal.

His screen-music career is equally thick. For Hirokazu Kore-eda's Like Father, Like Son, he won the Award for Excellence in Music at the 37th Japan Academy Film Prize. He scored the Super Sentai series Mashin Sentai Kiramager on TV Asahi, carrying the sound through its films and V-Cinext releases. In anime, he wrote The Ancient Magus' Bride and its OAD Those Awaiting a Star, plus Plunderer. He even composed "The Little Airplane with One Wing" for the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic opening ceremony.

One more thing is essential to understanding him: the irregular unit MATOKKU. Formed with theremin player Torion and ondes Martenot player Tomomi Kubo, the trio has performed alongside Akiko Yano's work. Theremin and ondes Martenot — how many score composers in Japan routinely treat these two early-20th-century electronic instruments as part of their standard ensemble?

The Stillness of Magus' Bride and the Heat of a Death Game

Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table follows a protagonist who treats lethal death games as a day job, executed with dispassionate routine. Working backwards from Matsumoto's past scores, we can guess why he was the right hire.

For The Ancient Magus' Bride, he wrote music that dissolved Celtic timbres into contemporary-classical harmony — quiet, close to prayer. Never talkative. In many scenes, the decision not to sound became the leading voice. For Mashin Sentai Kiramager, he mass-produced the exact opposite: pop, brightly colored scores where brass and percussion leap around.

That the same man wrote both is, I think, the answer to why he sits well on Death Game. Music for this genre needs more than sustained tension. It needs to travel, seamlessly, between "ordinary life" and "killing." Matsumoto has already staked out both ends in finished work.

  • The sound of prayer: the Magus' Bride lineage — static strings and keys that live in the empty space
  • The sound of the roar: the Kiramager lineage — hard-edged percussion and brass
  • The sound of the foreign body: the MATOKKU register, neither quite human voice nor quite machine

If the third one lands, it will land at the moment death approaches. Electronic sound without contour is the cheapest and strongest tool in the depiction of dread. Cheap enough that lesser works make it a cliché — but the calculus changes when the ear handling it has taken first place at a national composition competition.

What 41 Tracks Actually Signify

This soundtrack does not stop at the TV series. According to Nippon Columbia's product information, it also includes background music from the episode Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table 44: CLOUDY BEACH, screening theatrically from July 10, 2026. The album therefore lets you survey two formats — television and cinema — inside a single package.

Bundled alongside are the OP theme "¬Ersterbend," composed and arranged by LIN (MADKID) — an entirely instrumental piece — the TV-size ED theme "Inori" sung by Chiai Fujikawa (lyrics by Fujikawa, music and arrangement by Sema Kondo of Elements Garden), and the insert songs "Breathe" and "ReBreathe" performed by Machico and LIN (MADKID).

Worth pausing on: the OP theme was used fully instrumental. In an era where the sung TV-anime opening reigns absolute, this show hoisted a piece with no lyrics. And the title, "¬Ersterbend" — ersterbend is a score marking, an instruction to play as though dying away. That single detail tells you how deliberately the music side engineered its approach to the material.

The era of filing a score away as "an accessory to the work" ended long ago. Forty-one tracks is, quite literally, the size of the blueprint. On July 11, on disc or on streaming — listen to a national competition winner's death game, from the first track to the last.