No figure in Japanese folk music has carried a voice quite like Kan Mikami. Ragged, wounded, hilariously profane, fiercely lyrical and always alert to the violence beneath polite surfaces, his songs have spent more than half a century making conventional ideas of folk music sound hopelessly inadequate. A Life in Folk (and other bitter songs) presents the English-language edition of Mikami’s 2000 autobiography, Folk ni Ikiru, expanded with additional autobiographical writing, interview material and an exclusive CD documenting a live performance in Sapporo in February 2017. It is a book about one artist’s journey, but it also operates as a rough-hewn map of postwar Japan as heard from its margins.

Mikami has been called Japan’s most radical folk singer, though “folk” only begins to describe what he does. His music draws on blues, declamation, street poetry, theatrical monologue, obscene comedy, political disgust and the hard physical grain of lived experience. He sings as if language has to be dragged through mud before it can tell the truth. At different moments, the delivery can be hoarse, tender, belligerent, sardonic or terrifyingly exposed; what remains constant is the refusal of polish. In Mikami’s hands, a song is not a tasteful object to be completed and admired. It is an encounter, a wound, a dare and, occasionally, a dirty joke with a knife behind its back.

The autobiography offers an unusually direct route into the life behind that sound. Mikami writes of where he came from, how he found a way into music, the conditions that shaped his singular public presence and the long detours that separated survival from success. The book does not manufacture a heroic legend out of hardship. Instead, it lets contradictions remain audible: the performer’s bravado, the writer’s sensitivity, the outsider’s fury and the working artist’s instinct to keep moving even when the culture around him would prefer something more agreeable. The added texts and interviews extend the narrative beyond the original volume, giving readers a richer sense of Mikami’s evolution and his continuing engagement with song, speech and performance.

For listeners outside Japan, the book is especially valuable because Mikami’s work has often been reduced to easy labels: underground, outsider, folk, blues, cult figure. Those words point toward something real, but they can also make the music seem safely distant. A Life in Folk corrects that distance. It reveals an artist deeply rooted in Japanese language and social reality, yet also recognizably connected to every singer who has treated the voice as a means of refusal. Mikami belongs to the lineage of musicians for whom roughness is not a lack of technique but a form of knowledge. His art gives dignity to the unvarnished, the excessive and the inconvenient.

The accompanying CD, recorded live in Sapporo in February 2017, is more than a supplement. It places the older Mikami beside the younger man whose memories drive the book, allowing the reader to hear what endured. The performance carries the accumulated weight of decades without softening the essential edge. The voice may bear the marks of time, but it remains startlingly present: full of irregular breath, sudden force, mordant humor and the sense that each phrase is still being decided in the room. The recording makes the book’s central point physical. Mikami’s life in folk is not a completed history; it is an ongoing act of sounding out the world.

Published by Public Bath Press, this edition offers the complete translation of Folk ni Ikiru alongside the additional material and the previously unreleased concert recording. It is an essential document for readers interested in Japanese underground culture, postwar songwriting, radical performance and the dangerous, sustaining connection between biography and voice. Mikami’s story does not ask to be tidied up into inspiration. It asks to be heard in all its friction - a life of bitter songs, hard truths and stubborn artistic freedom.