When you talk about the sound of Japanese TV drama, you cannot skip this name: Masahiro Tokuda. “Unnatural,” “MIU404,” “Asagao: Forensic Doctor,” “Your Home Is My Business,” “Someday, I Will Remember This Love and Surely Cry”—in so many of those breath-holding moments in front of the screen, the music you heard came from his pen. On August 7 it was announced that the original soundtrack for the Nippon TV Saturday drama “Kokuhaku: The 25-Year Secret,” scored by Tokuda, will be released on September 9, 2026. Twenty-nine tracks in all. The series began airing on July 11, stars Hokuto Matsumura (SixTONES), and its theme song is likewise SixTONES’ “My Only.”
The craft of the “catchy” score
Masahiro Tokuda was born in 1984 in Kagoshima. He majored in composition at the Faculty of Education of Nagasaki University before entering the world of film and TV scoring. What makes his music special, I think, is the sheer strength of its hooks. The sprinting beat of “MIU404,” the aching yet dignified theme of “Unnatural”—even someone who hasn’t watched the show can hum them from the soundtrack alone. Underscore is, by nature, music that serves the picture from behind. Yet the melodies Tokuda writes stand up as songs in their own right while still hugging the images. That exquisite balance is surely why he has kept writing at the front line for more than a decade.
What is fascinating is that he is also a guitarist. Band-like groove, the breath of live instruments, and the thickness of an orchestra—because he can move between them within a single body, he can shift his tone from a fast-paced crime drama to a quiet love story as if a different person had written it.
The sound of “madness” inside a love-suspense
“Kokuhaku: The 25-Year Secret” is a “love-suspense” built around a protagonist who has loved a single woman for twenty-five years since childhood. Is it pure love, or a madness that goes by the name of obsession—that wavering is the engine of the story. Just scanning the announced track titles, that duality rises up like a blueprint. Names such as “A Fated Encounter?!,” “The Man Whose Love Is Too Heavy,” “Pure Love or Madness,” and “The ‘Madness’ Called Obsession” line up, showing a design that shuttles between sweetness and unease within the same body of music.
- “Kokuhaku” and “–The 25-Year Secret–”: the main-theme cluster carrying the core of the story. Several tracks bear the title itself, functioning as the “face” of the work.
- “Pandora” and “Kokuhaku ~Piano~”: placed near the end, these two quietly and cruelly illuminate the conclusion of a story that opens the box it should never have opened.
The music of love and the music of suspense are, by nature, written in completely different grammars. The former heads toward resolution; the latter toward sustained tension. It is precisely because Tokuda can write both that he was entrusted with the sound of this story in which love flips into fear.
Why listen to a TV-drama soundtrack?
Honestly, drama soundtracks get fewer chances to be “listened to on their own” than those of anime or film. Once the broadcast ends, the music tends to fall quietly asleep alongside the beloved scenes in our memory. That is exactly why leaving the sound in the form of a CD carries real meaning. Detached from the picture, a score becomes a device that recalls each listener’s own memories. You cried at that scene; you got goosebumps in that instant—with sound alone, you can trace that experience once more.
On September 9, the sound of “the most innocent, most dangerous love” that Hokuto Matsumura performed arrives in your hands as a package. Tokuda, a true craftsman, carves yet another television memory into music. For those following the broadcast, of course—but also for anyone looking for a doorway into the deep genre of TV-drama scoring—this disc comes, quietly but firmly, recommended.
