Today, August 8, the Osaka leg of the “My Hero Academia” IN Concert opens at the main hall of Grand Cube Osaka. As the centerpiece of the anime’s 10th-anniversary project, composer Yuki Hayashi—who has single-handedly scored the entire series—takes the stage alongside the special orchestra band “THE HEROES” to play “the sound of those battles” live. With live re-dubbing and talk segments from cast members such as Daiki Yamashita and Nobuhiko Okamoto, it is a night where footage and orchestra share the same air. It feels like the right moment to dig back into the music of Yuki Hayashi, one of the busiest film-scoring composers working today.
It all started on the rhythmic-gymnastics mat
Yuki Hayashi was born in 1980 in Kyoto. His entry point into music is a little unusual. In high school he competed in men’s rhythmic gymnastics, and while choosing the background music for his own routines he fell in love with music itself. He soon moved from choosing to creating, becoming a composer of accompaniment pieces for the sport. This is the crucial, fascinating part: designing the peak of physical movement and emotion in sound, within a fixed length of time—that is precisely what scoring images is all about. The control of “time and elation” he cultivated on the mat would become his weapon in the years to come.
From a single demo tape sent to Hiroyuki Sawano
His turning point came when he sent a demo tape to the senior composer Hiroyuki Sawano. That opened the door, and from 2009 he entered the world of screen scoring, after which his career accelerated dramatically. Honing his craft on live-action works such as the crime drama “Strawberry Night,” the courtroom series “Legal High,” and the morning drama “Asa ga Kita,” he has also built a body of anime landmarks that cross genres—“Haikyu!!,” “My Hero Academia,” “Blue Lock,” “Medalist,” and “SAKAMOTO DAYS.” The “forward drive” of sports and the “heat and weight” of heroic action: it is surprisingly rare for a single composer to render two such opposite textures with this kind of purity.
“Music that runs” and the sound of youth
Hayashi’s true forte is turning “motion” into sound. The beat that keeps pace with players sprinting across the court in “Haikyu!!,” the aggressive rhythms that stoke the egoism of “Blue Lock,” and the roar of brass at the moment Quirks collide in “My Hero Academia”—each one carries the sensation of “a body moving forward,” sweeping the listener’s own pulse along with it. You can clearly see how the “synchronization of movement and sound” he cultivated in gymnastics accompaniment flows seamlessly into the sports and battles on screen. Line up his scores and you notice a single spine running through them all, across genres: “music that makes you short of breath.” Now that the culture of “re-performing” film scores in concert is taking hold—such as the “Free!” orchestra tour visiting Yokohama, Kyoto, and Nagoya this August—Hayashi’s music, too, is well worth verifying in a hall.
A philosophy of “music that makes the picture better”
What Hayashi says again and again is that his stance is not about standing out himself, but “music that makes the visuals better.” It is precisely because he restrains himself from stepping too far forward as a musician that his impact, when he leans into a scene, becomes so striking. In 2021 he went independent with his own office “Hayashi Seisakusho,” gaining more freedom in his work. This year, following the May 30 Pacifico Yokohama show, come these Osaka performances (August 8 and 9), and in December a concert bearing his own name is on the calendar as well. Can he lift an audience to its feet with sound alone, once the “partner” of the image is deliberately removed? A concert is, for a film composer, the most thrilling test of skill there is. On this Osaka night, the answer will ring out.
