On the cover of his new album “Jumon” (“Spell”), Yuta Orisaka sits in a somewhat old-fashioned kitchen, like one you might find at your grandparents’ house. There’s a bowl of what looks like parsley on the counter; one of the cupboard doors is crooked. Look closely and you might see a cat theme: a cat-shaped teapot on the windowsill, a maneki-neko (beckoning cat) figurine on a drying rack. Another small detail: the 34-year-old songwriter seems to have grown a hairy tail.
It’s not his house, in case you were wondering. Orisaka borrowed someone else’s house for the shoot, “but they didn’t ask me to say whose kitchen it was.”
This image of strange domesticity is echoed in our interview, in an office space in central Tokyo. Orisaka is joined by his 8-year-old son, who is taking the day off from school; he sits quietly playing a Nintendo Switch. It’s normal for managers or label staff to sit in on an interview, but this is the first I’ve done in the presence of an artist’s child.
