Sakamoto reunited with Bertolucci on The Sheltering Sky (1990), starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger as a couple travelling in North Africa amid marital ennui, and again on Little Buddha (1993). Madonna cast him as a director in a music video within a music video for her 1993 song Rain.

But Sakamoto was far more comfortable behind the screen. He scored approximately 50 feature films, documentaries and television projects, including Wuthering Heights in 1992, starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, the 1993 miniseries Wild Palms, produced by Oliver Stone, and Snake Eyes (1998) and Femme Fatale in 2002 for director Brian De Palma.

In 2015, filmmaker Alejandro Iñárrito asked Sakamoto to write music for his survivalist film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a frontiersman staving off vicious bears and the elements in the early 19th century.

Working with the German musician Alva Noto, Sakamoto used cold synthesizers and layers of sound and approximated slow, heavy breaths for this story about a man’s return from near death. 

Shortly before taking the assignment, Sakamoto said he had recovered from throat cancer and said the sounds he created for The Revenant were influenced by what he called “the closest moment to death in my life.”

Ryuichi Sakamoto was born in Tokyo on January 17, 1952. His father was a prominent editor who worked on books by Yukio Mishima and Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe.

“I remember our house was always full of writers, poets and creative people who were sort of outcasts in Japanese society, sitting around talking and drinking all night,” Sakamoto told the The Times of London. “I was very conscious of being different from other people; it felt natural to be different.”

His mother designed women’s hats and played the piano, exposing him to classical music from infancy. Sakamoto started playing piano when he was three and was writing music at 10. He grew up on a steady diet of Western culture, from TV westerns to the Beatles, but he also gravitated toward the daring work of composer John Cage and French New Wave films.

‘Our house was always full of writers, poets and creative people who were outcasts in Japanese society.’

Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto on his formative years

“They destroyed classical rules and concepts,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “I was taking more traditional European composing and piano classes, and they had all these rules, foreign rules. People like Cage let music and art be free.”

During high school in the 1960s, he attended anti-Vietnam demonstrations and jazz clubs, forming a band with his friends to play bossa nova and Miles Davis music.

In the mid-1970s, at what is now Tokyo University of the Arts, he received a master’s degree in music composition but also became intensely devoted to the study of electronic and ethnic music.

For his many solo albums, Sakamoto used the term “Neo Geo” to describe a musical melting pot with no geographical borders. 

“I have a cultural map in my head,” he told the Daily Telegraph in 2002, “where I find similarities between different cultures. For example, domestic Japanese pop music sounds like Arabic music to me ... and, in my mind, Bali is next to New York. Maybe everyone has these geographies in their head. This is the way I’ve been working.”

On the 1989 album Beauty, he played in a nine-piece band with musicians from England, the United States, Brazil and Japan. In 1997 he released Discord, a work in four movements that combined a 70-piece orchestra, a DJ and text narrated by Bertolucci, Byrne and Patti Smith, that Sakamoto wrote based on his conversations with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the Dalai Lama about salvation.

He became increasingly concerned about the environment, especially after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. He recorded music on a waterlogged piano in a school destroyed by the resulting tsunami and incorporated those and other sounds harvested from forests and oceans into the 2017 album async.

Sakamoto, who had lived in New York City since 1990, was married several times, including to pop singer Akiko Yano. Survivors include his wife Norika Sora, who was also his manager; and several children, including singer Miu Sakamoto from his marriage to Yano. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.