While other Japanese artists tour the United States, Zazen Boys leader Mukai Shutoku is making the New York-New Jersey area his own. His acclaimed avant-garde rock group, the successor to his legendary hard rock band Number Girl, played two shows here last fall (with one detour to Maryland) and another three in March, and they plan to return in September. Before his Mar. 8 show at Pianos NYC, the indie rock king took some time to chat with purple SKY about language differences, his plans for a world tour, and his favorite beer. Watch out, New York City: This is Zazen Boys town now.

Call Mukai Shutoku and New York City kindred spirits.

Until he feels ready to embark on a national tour, the aloof, beer-guzzling rocker wants to cultivate an audience in New York by playing shows there. He’s drawn to the city because of the freedom he perceives in its people. “They don’t care what others think,” he says, “they just care what they think.”

The same could be said of Zazen Boys and their challenging layers of aggressive rock, chants and dub. The band dispenses with tonality, hooks and even songwriting at will.

It’s an attitude that doesn’t please everyone. Their 2006 album Zazen Boys III included improvised songs, which some fans and reviewers criticized as incomprehensible. Mukai acknowledges the album’s freestyle and all-instrumental tracks might bore some listeners, but says that Zazen Boys switches back and forth between composed and improvised music, and he wanted to showcase that latter half of their sound.

Mukai takes interest in how people from other cultures respond to his music. He thinks American audiences make their feelings more obvious than Japanese ones, citing a man at the Mar. 7 Asbury Park show who came to the front of the stage after drinking several beers. His dancing and screaming made it clear he was having a good time. “Or maybe,” Mukai says, “he just drunk.”

Once he has a strategy for it, Mukai wants Zazen Boys to tour worldwide. He fantasizes about playing successive shows in Japanese cities like Tokyo and Sendai, and then saying, “OK, let’s go to Boston next week!”

Mukai bases his New York concerts on Number Girl’s 1999 show at the music festival South by Southwest, an experience he says changed him. It was the first time he was able to connect emotionally with American listeners.

His first U.S. concert with Zazen Boys, which was part of an omnibus J-rock show at the Music Hall of Willamsburg on Sept. 28, prompted a mix of familiar and unfamiliar feelings. Playing for people who liked Japanese music but didn’t necessarily know of Zazen Boys reminded him of performing at music festivals in Japan. At the same time, he felt awkward because he hadn’t played with some of the bands, such as Bakubeni, before.

Mukai wanted the March shows to be more “progressive” than the fall ones. He expected people who attended the previous shows to return, and he looked forward to getting paid by the venues this time. Last time, he didn’t even get any free beer!

Of course, though American and other international listeners might enjoy Zazen Boys’s music enough to dance drunkenly to it, they probably won’t understand the lyrics. Mukai cares about the language barrier, but hopes that the sound of his music and words can convey images and feelings when the lyrics can’t. He notes that, because he uses words in unconventional ways, even Japanese people might not understand his “strange lyrics.”

Strange, indeed—throughout Mukai’s career in Number Girl and Zazen Boys, he’s named his songs and albums memorably and puzzlingly. “Manga Sick”? School Girl Distortional Addict? “Brain Construction”? During his trips to the U.S., Mukai purchases five-subject notebooks and fills them with words that come to his mind. He creates his titles by pairing up ones that sound good together. Even if the words have no logical connection, they make sense because they’re all from his mind.

But don’t expect Mukai to be able to describe the meanings of all his song titles. During his fall 2008 tour, Mukai explained the meaning of each song during his MCs. But when he got to “Daruma,” named after Japanese wishing dolls, he just said: “Daruma means…daruma.” It turns out Mukai wasn’t forgetting his lines. “I can’t explain daruma,” Mukai says in English. “Daruma is daruma.”

Even the moniker Zazen Boys is based on its ear-pleasing qualities. Mukai modeled it after the name of a 70’s neo-psychedelica group, Soft Boys, because he thought the two words created a “strange feeling” together. He likes the contrast between the sharp z’s in “zazen” and the soft s ending in “boys,” noting that a third z would have been too much. When I jokingly asked if Zazen Boys was a response to Number Girl, Mukai threw his head back and laughed, having never thought of the connection.

Mukai hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a stateside release or an album with English lyrics. “If I dream in English, I could make songs in English,” he says. But right now he’s writing in Japanese, and he wouldn’t sign any record contract that would require him to write English lyrics.

Mukai’s in the process of making music, but has no album planned yet—though even if he were working on one, its style would be subject to change depending on what he felt like doing. One of the songs under construction is about a wild cat that befriends women working at a kiosk.

The complex rhythms and chants in Zazen Boys’s music reveal how much thought and effort their composed songs involved. Yet onstage, Mukai performs them effortlessly and with a smirk, aided by ample beer. (His favorite is Kirin.) Mukai’s thoughtful side comes through in his interview, where he takes on pensive thinking poses—a hand on his chin, his eyes looking upward. Occasionally he moves his hands in swimming motions resembling the way he sometimes dances onstage.

Mukai says he formed Zazen Boys as an opportunity to make the music he wants without the limitations of genre and style. Comparatively, while Number Girl also played the music he wanted to make, the whole was the sum of its parts—without one member, it wouldn’t have been the same band. Thus, the band broke up when bassist Nakao Kentarou left. Though Zazen Boys and the Pixies-inspired Number Girl sound quite different, Mukai considers the two bands connected by his creative side.

Mukai says he wishes he could come to New York every month, but it’s impossible. But for each show, he wants to know what people who hadn’t heard Zazen Boys’s music before think of it. If you missed the band’s previous U.S. shows, you’ll have another chance to tell Mukai your impressions in September. Or you could wait for the world tour.

Translation by Itsuko Hirai

Photos by Leisl Schrader