New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2023. This book explores how artists, fans, amateur practitioners, and others have used music to tell stories of everyday life in Japan from the late 1940s to 2018, a practice that the book calls "musical storytelling."From postwar jazz to contemporary rock, from 1960s "anti-war folk" to Japanese pops (enka) and the "girls' rock" of the 1980s, the book explores the political uses of music, reassesses so-called "protest music," and grapples with the complex political-ness of artists themselves, many of whom have continued to interrogate conditions of everyday life in Japan well into the contemporary moment.