A singer-songwriter’s name in the composer credits is no longer unusual. But when that person is counted as one of the characters, things get more interesting. For the film Satoko wa Itsumo, opening September 18, singer-songwriter Satoko Shibata wrote the score – and was billed as “the fourth Satoko,” following the three Satokos who appear in the story. The moment I read that framing, I nodded to myself. It declares that the score isn’t accompaniment played from outside the story, but another figure standing inside it.
The Billing: “The Fourth Satoko”
Satoko wa Itsumo is a wholly original work by director Shuichi Okita, marking his 20th anniversary since his feature debut. Kasumi Arimura, Hikari Ishida, and Kaharu Himeno each play a different Satoko – same name, same reading, yet living in entirely different places and times. Their lives quietly intersect. Anyone, the film suggests, can write one book: the story of themselves.
Shibata joining as “the fourth Satoko” carries real weight. She is a writer who has built her career catching the tiny tremors of everyday life through an idiosyncratic sense of language and melody. Rather than applying music to someone’s life from the outside, she sits beside them and keeps a diary with them. That proximity is exactly what these nameless Satokos needed. It is another moment in which the outline of what a “score composer” can be grew a little softer and wider.
Twenty Tracks Beside the Three Satokos
The soundtrack CD, out September 16, collects 19 pieces of score plus the theme song. Just scanning the titles makes clear this is less a set of cues than a set of stories. “Satoko, Write” appears three times, spelled three different ways for each Satoko – each given her own resolve-to-take-up-the-pen track. The composer diligently voices three separate “sounds of gripping a pencil.”
The tracklist has motifs numbered like “Imagination 1” and “Imagination 2,” titles that imply consecutive scenes such as “The Bookshop of Little Birds and Snow” and “The Bookshop, After,” and words carved straight out of daily detail – “Trampoline,” “A Pencil Late at Night,” “Coincidence” – that feel unmistakably like Shibata. Instead of striking grand themes, she turns small nouns into sound. This is her songwriting world intact, and it runs at a completely different temperature from scores that push emotion through orchestration.
What It Means for a Singer to Step into Scoring
What’s striking is that the crossing happens in the theme song too. Closing the CD is “Shimire (feat. Satoko Shibata),” in which songwriter Yuta Orisaka welcomes Shibata as a vocalist. The person who wrote the score sings on another songwriter’s theme; the line between maker and performer keeps flipping within the work. In recent years, indie- and folk-leaning artists like Orisaka and Shibata are increasingly called to the center of film music. Choosing to invite a specific human voice itself as the score, rather than a ready-made orchestral idiom, is quietly taking root in how Japanese films are scored.
Among a fall release slate full of large-scale soundtracks, this one is clearly a different animal. It isn’t flashy. But it has the intimacy of someone sitting beside the three Satokos, opening a notebook with them. Heard before the film it becomes preparation; heard after, it leaves the sense that those people are still writing their books somewhere. On September 16, twenty tracks arrive that serve as score composer Satoko Shibata’s calling card. The film opens September 18. Follow the story the fourth Satoko wrote – by ear.
