GACKT -- Returner ~ Yami no Shuuen（闇の終焉）

GACKT is life...the high life, that is.

GACKT is an Okinawan-born singer-songwriter-actor who specializes in hard rock and was also the vocalist for the Visual-kei band Malice Mizer. I actually had to look that up on J-Wiki and Wikipedia to make sure since, really, the only knowledge and sightings that I've had of this fellow, who reminds me of a Japanese Jeff Goldblum in his looks, has been through an annual TV Asahi special known as "Geinojin Kakuzuke Check"（芸能人格付けチェック...Celebrity Status Check）.

As much as he is a rock singer, GACKT seems to have an almost supernatural ability to distinguish the true versions of the good stuff from the cheapo knockoffs (relatively speaking). He's an uber-esthete, so to speak. For the past decade or so, on "Geinojin Kakuzuke Check", he's been able to, without any hints to identification of the product, tell through his senses which one is Matsuzaka beef and which one is some inexpensive supermarket meat, which glass has the rarest and tastiest and most expensive vintage of wine and which glass contains a perfectly drinkable wine of merely 5000 yen a bottle, and so on.

The show has had GACKT compete with other celebrities. For every wrong choice made, the celebrities get taken down ranks from their initial "First Class" standing down to "No Status" in which case through the magic of special effects, they're rendered null and void. Up to this year, GACKT on his own has passed the past 58 tests over the 2010s and so has usually kept his "First Class" standing by the end of each special, thanks to a partner who apparently has had just as much aesthetic taste as he does. At the same time, he's become famous for his stoic Spock-like assessments with his barbed tongue (although he has a brilliant smile when he does smile) and for his constant consumption of snacks and pistachio nuts while he's waiting for the final judgement after each test.

Unfortunately for GACKT, the most recent edition which was televised on New Year's Day a few weeks ago had his partner, Sho Kiryuin（鬼龍院翔）of Golden Bomber（ゴールデンボンバー）, make a couple of mismatches which brought the duo down all the way to "Third Class", a level that had the singer fuming. Still, his solo record is intact.

With his outsized presence on "Geinojin Kakuzuke Check", it can be pretty easy for me to forget that he's in the music business. However, I did find this June 2007 single, his 27th, "Returner ~ Yami no Shuuen" (Demise of Darkness). Written and composed by GACKT, the song is about that futile search for one more embrace from his beloved before the end, something that is echoed in the music video which has him as a samurai in his final battle.

"Returner" has been GACKT's first and so far only No. 1 single and has also shown up on his July 2010 "The Eleventh Day ~ Single Collection" which peaked at No. 7 on the album charts. The song also got him his final of 5 appearances to date on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen.

Considering that my musical images of Japanese historical epics have usually been that of Mexican trumpets and dramatic strings, it's been interesting that in the last several years, hard rock seems to have become the genre of choice for such shows or movies either in anime or live-action. Still, I was surprised to read on J-Wiki that "Returner" was actually the theme song for the Christopher Nolan movie "The Prestige" in Japanese theatres.