Supervised by the director himself: five titles on vinyl in Japan for the first time

When people remember a Wong Kar-wai film, they usually remember the sound first: the languid song looping through the cramped apartment in Chungking Express, or the waltz that follows two people passing each other on a narrow stairway in In the Mood for Love. Few directors are recalled by melody before plot. On November 4, 2026, the soundtracks to five of his films arrive on vinyl in Japan for the very first time.

According to an announcement posted by Universal Music on September 17, the titles are Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and 2046. All are strictly limited 180g heavyweight pressings, each on its own color vinyl. Wong personally supervised the design and production, and every edition includes three clear cards featuring film scenes plus liner notes written specifically for the Japanese release.

  • Chungking Express (UIJY-75440 / clear yellow) — Faye Wong's "Dream Person," alongside tracks by The Mamas & The Papas, The Flying Pickets and Dinah Washington
  • Fallen Angels (UIJY-75441 / clear light green) — a sequence that includes The Flying Pickets' "Only You"
  • Happy Together (UIJY-75442 / clear green) — built around the music of Ástor Piazzolla
  • In the Mood for Love (UIJY-75443 / clear red) — 25 tracks in all, from Shigeru Umebayashi's "Yumeji's Theme" to Nat King Cole, Zhou Xuan and Rebecca Pan, and on into Cantonese opera, Peking opera and pingtan
  • 2046 (UIJY-75444/5 / clear orange) — the only double LP in the set

Four titles are priced at ¥7,700 each (tax included); the double-LP 2046 is ¥9,900. Each set of liner notes has its own author: Naoto Mori for Chungking Express, Ranna Yuki for Fallen Angels, Michiyo Nishimori for Happy Together, Madoka Yamazaki for In the Mood for Love and Sumio Toyama for 2046. Taken together, the five records are designed to be read as much as played.

Written music versus chosen music: what Umebayashi's theme tells us about scoring

When we say "film score," we usually mean original music composed for that specific film. Wong Kar-wai's soundtracks stand slightly outside that definition. Line up these five records and you can see it: Piazzolla, Nat King Cole, The Mamas & The Papas, an operatic aria, Chinese traditional forms. Pre-existing recordings sit with exactly the same weight as original themes.

For this director, music is not a device for explaining a scene but for setting its speed. By repeating the same cue almost obsessively, he tunes the audience's internal clock to the film's tempo. Faye Wong in Chungking Express and Piazzolla in Happy Together burn themselves into memory not simply because they are great pieces, but because the number of repetitions — and the silences between them — have been calculated. Designing emotion through selection and placement rather than composition is its own form of scoring.

"Yumeji's Theme" in In the Mood for Love is the emblem of this. Its composer, Shigeru Umebayashi, led the new wave band EX on guitar and vocals and backed Eric Clapton on a Japanese tour in the early 1980s. After the band broke up he turned to film music, and in 2023 he received a lifetime achievement award at the Rome Film Festival. The theme itself comes from the music he wrote for Seijun Suzuki's 1991 film Yumeji. In other words, the melody most identified with In the Mood for Love was repurposed from a Japanese film released nine years earlier. The line between original and pre-existing simply stops meaning anything here.

Flipping the record becomes an act of editing

These five albums are unusually well suited to the LP format. In the Mood for Love splits its 25 tracks into 14 on side A and 11 on side B, so when one side ends you have to stand up and turn the disc over. The break that vanishes under streaming shuffle returns as a physical gesture — the listener reproducing the film's chapter divisions by hand.

2046 makes this even clearer: its main theme keeps returning in new guises, with percussion, as a rumba, as a train remix. Latin standards such as "Shiboney," "Sway" and "Perfidia," an aria from the opera Norma, and the names Shigeru Umebayashi and Peer Raben side by side in the credits. Being able to hear that stratified record side by side, rather than as one long stream, matters.

For anyone who follows film scoring, these are not merely records for listening to scores. They are documents for reading a set of choices: which piece, in what order, repeated how many times. There is arguably a more complex blueprint here than in a soundtrack credited to a single composer. On November 4, five colors of vinyl land at once — and whichever one you drop the needle on first will decide the color of the Hong Kong in your memory.