Meeting Uncle Yuji certainly accomplishes what its title promises: we see the artist Daisuke Kosugi travelling to New York to meet his uncle for the first time. But in the process, as we are presented with this encounter, Kosugi’s film raises more questions than it answers. Is Yuji lonely? What drives his passion for music? Is the music that he makes bad? Or is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ music an irrelevant metric when it comes to personal expression?
Nonetheless, Kosugi’s fascinating film provides a strong example of how reality can shatter expectations, at the same time giving us insight into someone we would likely never encounter, a person who keeps to himself and lives a very modest life in one of most crowded cities in the world. We are repeatedly plunged into darkness during the full duration of several of Yuji Kosugi’s recordings and this experience becomes remarkably generative. How rare it is to focus one’s attention so completely onto music of any kind, let alone sounds that are difficult, perhaps naive but also overwhelmingly rewarding. —Herb Shellenberger