When a Keigo Higashino mystery gets adapted for the screen, most listeners expect heavy strings and piano. Instead, Hakucho to Komori (The Swan and the Bat), released nationwide in Japan by Shochiku on September 4, 2026, handed its score to Shohei Amimori — a composer born in 1990 who has spent his career dismantling the borders between contemporary classical music, electronica and pop. Two days before the premiere, on September 2, Nippon Columbia released the 29-track album Hakucho to Komori (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (COCP-42754, 3,500 yen incl. tax). The fact that the music reached the public before the film did says a lot about how much weight the score carries here.

From the Geidai Composition Department to “Broken Pop”: Amimori as a Foreign Body

Shohei Amimori was born in Tokyo in 1990. He graduated from the composition department of the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2012 and completed his graduate studies there in 2015. He received the Yoshio Hasegawa Prize in 2011, the Messiaen Prize at the Kyoto French Music Academy in 2013, and first place in the composition division of the Japan Music Competition that same year. On paper, this is the résumé of an orthodox contemporary-classical composer.

What actually made his name, though, was a body of work that betrays that orthodoxy. SONASILE (2016), Patamusic (2018), Ex.LIFE (2021) — each looks like pop music at first glance, yet the shape quietly collapses by the time it ends, with electronics, voices and acoustic instruments blended in distinctly untextbook proportions. In recent years he has played keyboards in Taeko Onuki's band and co-produced the Hokkaido duo LAUSBUB, whose album society | lazy arrived on September 9, 2026. He also served as music director for season 10 of NHK Educational's Musica Piccolino. In short, he is that rare kind of screen composer who carries three circuits — contemporary classical, electronica and pop — at the same time.

His entry into film scoring came with Hyakka (2022). According to Nippon Columbia's official information, he has since scored Sunset Sunrise and Exit 8 as well. Both Sunset Sunrise and Hakucho to Komori are directed by Yoshiyuki Kishi, making this their second collaboration. Kishi came out of documentary work and traces the outlines of people without editorializing; Amimori's music refuses to be swept along by sentiment. The fit itself becomes part of the film's credibility.

The 29 Track Titles Draw a Map of Aichi Prefecture

Read the track list and the film's blueprint is almost visible. It opens with “Gaze,” “Investigation” and “Bills” — short fragments that observe the crime from the outside. Then track 4 is “Nagoya,” and track 20 is “Tokoname.” Two of the 29 cues named after places in Aichi Prefecture is no accident: the source novel, a Higashino mystery that has sold more than 1.6 million copies, binds both the crime and the family memory to specific ground. When a score sounds not like “landscape” but like a place name, the music stops explaining and starts functioning as evidence.

Titles such as “Father's Hometown,” “Memories of Father,” “Moving Day” and “Two by the Riverside” make another thing clear: these 29 cues are not only assigned to the criminal side of the story. Split the list roughly into three layers and it looks like this.

  • The layer of investigation and surveillance — “Investigation,” “Security Camera,” “Statute of Limitations,” “Mistake,” “Disguise.” The sound of procedure.
  • The layer of family and place — “Nagoya,” “Father's Hometown,” “Memories of Father,” “Moving Day,” “Tokoname.” The sound of memory settling.
  • The layer being peeled away — “Suspicion,” “The True Culprit,” “The Swindler,” “Truth,” “Tears,” “Hope for Two,” and the closing “Chimney.”

The sequencing is suggestive too: the title cue “The Swan and the Bat” sits at track 21, immediately followed by “The True Culprit.” Swan and bat — the side of light and the side of darkness — are caught once by the music in the middle before the story flips. As an album, that ordering works as a self-contained narrative even for listeners who have not yet seen the film.

The Theme Song Is Motoki Ohmori's “Gray” — So Who Fills the Space Between Black and White?

The theme song, “Haiiro” (“Gray”), was written for the film by Motoki Ohmori of Mrs. GREEN APPLE under his solo name. That the title is neither white nor black but gray names the project's central problem exactly. If the song takes charge of the territory that is neither swan nor bat, neither perpetrator nor victim, then the score's job is to calibrate the density of that gray scene by scene.

This is where the casting of Amimori proves shrewd. His music has always avoided clear emotional signposting: harmonies that are neither major nor minor, acoustic textures that read as synthetic, electronic sounds that seem to breathe. The greatest danger in scoring a mystery is that the music announces “this is the culprit” before the film does. Amimori's writing makes that structurally difficult. The unresolvable ambiguity carried by leads Hokuto Matsumura and Mio Imada is not reinforced from the side by the music; the score simply runs alongside it at the same temperature.

Over the past few years, the pipeline bringing contemporary-classical composers into mainstream Japanese entertainment has visibly widened. Among those projects, these 29 tracks stand out for competing through restraint of judgment rather than display of technique. You leave the cinema and what lingers is not the resolution of the case but thirty seconds of “Nagoya” or “Tokoname” — a soundtrack engineered, it seems, for exactly that afterimage.