Featured Essay: Samurai Champloo’s Departure and its Arrival

by Danielle Shi

In late spring of last year, after my partner and I made the move to the bottom of a hill in Berkeley, he surprised me with the record Departure, from the Samurai Champloo soundtrack. He made sure to pick up the album for me from a location on the university campus, surrounded by squirrels, so that I wouldn’t spot the sleeve or discover it ahead of time in the mail. I had already established something of a routine around the postal service, blasting “Please Mr. Postman” by The Carpenters whenever the white truck rolled around. I was infatuated with the mail carrier because of my new typewriter, which I liked to slot postcards into, covering them in black type and vintage stamps. Every day I kept a lookout for what we called “fun mail”, the return messages from those who wrote back: cards of Japanese sea creature folklore, droll bunny clowns. 

Our Audio-Technica turntable, atop the secondhand teak console, was a birthday gift from my father during the pandemic, before I managed to find my way back to the Bay. It has seen me through three separate moves, once or twice sadly hidden in storage because I had nowhere to put it. My father had originally set the sound system up for me in my mother’s old apartment, as I sat at the piano and played a few tunes for him, that day one of the few times I learned about his taste in classical music, his strong preference for the Satie and the Chopin over the Schumann and Pachelbel, each reveal its own surprise. As much as I enjoy a prelude, Departure’s instrumental hip-hop is what I find myself reaching for when there are silences to fill, or when we have company over.

These days my partner and I bring out Departure whenever we want to slow down—with the manual flipping of the record taking an interval to sink into a good book. Or, in his case, watch myriad videos about coffee, and how to perfect the technique to one’s craft. My partner cares for the ritual of pouring a tulip, its smooth lineation, a Rosetta’s gentle fern. As it stands, Departure makes for a good record to enjoy in a café space, before the customers appear in throngs. With its smooth rhythmic interludes and blend of instrumental hip-hop, it feels understated, almost shy, while creating layers of texture that settle out the way foam sits atop a drink. At his last coffee competition, a kind of magical gathering for coffee aficionados and connoisseurs, he played Departure’s tracks “arurarian dance”, “mystline”, and “the space between two world” as the backdrop to his set, evoking a sense of tender familiarity and home while onstage impressing the judges.

As one of the soundtracks from Shinichiro Watanabe’s cult classic anime, Departure cues memories for me of the summer nights of my childhood, where I would sneak into the living room after bedtime to watch the show on Adult Swim. Three friends of circumstance—a down-on-her-luck waitress, a feral bandit, and a Zen ronin—run around on their own whale quest in an anachronistic Edo-era Japan. The trio of unlikely companions sojourns from here to there, city to countryside, all the while beating up riff raff and participating in eating contests, baseball games, and the ukiyo-e art world, narrowly escaping danger and wily enemies. I remember being utterly transfixed by the collage of calligraphy scroll and katana images that populated the rap opening, “battlecry” by Nujabes featuring Shing02. With the intro track, I came to discover the comforting, soul-soothing music by Nujabes, fat jon, MINMI, and force of nature. The closing song to each episode, “Shiki No Uta (Song of Four Seasons)” by MINMI, was a calming song I painstakingly taught myself to sing. By summer’s end I had looped it over six hundred times on iTunes, delighted when I found out my college roommate knew the Japanese lyrics by heart, too. While unwrapping the gift of the record, I found its lyrics in an insert, and it was like unearthing a time capsule so many years after the fact.

To rewind one more time, high school saw me listening to Departure in a corner of the nearby university’s library, where I reblogged film photos on my Tumblr and surfed the WWW. The textured hip-hop soundtracks are sublime, and I mention the library because of the study culture borne out of this genre of music; Departure’s instrumental hip-hop ushered in an era of study music at its finest, perfect to leave on while trying to concentrate on a hard text or churn out an essay. Save for the beginning and end of the record, the songs pulsate without the interruption or distraction of vocals, with alternating drumbeat tempos that evoke mountain chase scenes and nighttime riverside revelations. The album doesn’t particularly make me want to race to the typewriter, nor does it really inspire me to pick up the guitar. What it does provide is a deep sense of comfort, and positive associations with scenes from an engrossing anime that enliven my work periods with intimations of journeying and adventure.

It wasn’t until around midway through my college years that I fell into a collector’s mindset with vinyl, beginning with scouring eBay for CDs of The Beatles, as good a place to start as any. The CDs I found were styled after Japanese mini-LPs, and provided my first real exposure to records. In time, I would poke around Amoeba Berkeley for records to play on a Columbia GP-3, a portable cream and red turntable with a handle that I carried around for listening parties in friends’ rooms, and from room to room of my student housing co-operative. Lately, I would say my partner and I are making a slow turn into folk, bringing home Joan Baez’s arresting vocals alongside a stack of dollar vinyl, finding the old stars like Kate and Anna McGarrigle—and celebrating the welcome discovery of female songwriters who do make me want to practice lyricism, to move into the music and write my own encoded poetic refrains. 

Though, we still put on Departure when there’s no need to talk, and the soundscapes and the images they conjure up overtake us entirely. I think there will always be those tracks that make one reminisce about childhood. The two of us drink homebrewed co-fermented coffee out of green jadeite cups while waiting for the music to settle, content in our return to the past, and its pleasures.

Danielle Shi lives and writes in Berkeley, CA. Her work has been published at Michigan Quarterly Review Mixtape (forthcoming), Denver Quarterly (forthcoming), The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, ZYZZYVA Magazine Blog, and The Frida Cinema Blog. She will be spending this spring in residence at the Prelinger Library and Winslow House Project, working on her novel The Shelter. In her spare time, she enjoys drinking kombucha-flavored kombucha and taking photographs of everything. http://www.danielleshi.com/

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