We Are X Tells the Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Story America Has Never Heard

An excellent new doc profiles one of Japan’s most famous bands—and captures the transcendence and pain of devoting your life to music.
Image may contain Clothing Apparel Coat Jacket Human Person Leather Jacket and Costume
A young X Japan clad in their signature visual kei style. (Photo courtesy of Drafthouse Films)

“What was the cause of the breakup?” a radio host asks X Japan songwriter and drummer Yoshiki, early in Stephen Kijak’s new documentary We Are X. “Were you not getting along, or were there changes in the musical climate in Japan?” Yoshiki replies, simply, “My vocalist got brainwashed.”

It’s the kind of jab Keith Richards might take at Mick Jagger, or Liam Gallagher at his brother Noel—an absurd exaggeration meant to deflect blame for intra-band strife onto the preferred sparring partner of the member most prone to public complaining. But the quiet sadness with which Yoshiki responds to the question about his since-reunited Japanese metal band’s 1997 breakup is the first sign that he’s not embellishing anything. Later, Kijak fills in the true story of the decade that X’s singer, Toshi, spent in a cult that bullied him into believing the band’s music was evil.

We Are X is full of incredible anecdotes like this. They sound like tall tales of rock‘n’roll tragedy, but each one turns out to have happened exactly as described. Taken together, they create the impression that the band’s epic, three-decade history is the product of fate more than calculated myth-making. It seems obvious that the members of X Japan would have led spectacle-laden musical lives even if they’d never graduated from tiny clubs to stadiums—and this is precisely what makes their career an ideal case study in rock as raison d'être.

The band’s biography would already be familiar to American audiences if the West paid as much attention to Japanese popular music as Japan famously devotes to ours. In the 34 years since Yoshiki and Toshi formed X as high school students, their combination of KISS-style theatrics, speed-metal intensity, and emotional pop balladry has sold 30 million records. They are pioneers of a genre called “visual kei,” a Japanese glam analog born in the mid-’80s that originally paired outrageous, androgynous costumes and over-the-top performances with heavy rock music, but has since become more of a look than a sound. One critic Kijak interviews insists that the timeline of rock in Japan can be divided into two eras: “before X” and “after X.”

As We Are X tells it, the band’s story hinges on Yoshiki’s lifelong battle with illness and mortality. Kijak’s earlier documentaries about Scott Walker and Jaco reveal an ongoing fascination with one-of-a-kind musical geniuses, and X’s leader is as remarkable a subject as the director has ever profiled. A self-consciously messianic figure who occasionally poses wearing a crown of thorns, Yoshiki suffers for his art in the most literal way possible.

As a sickly child, he was often hospitalized with a severe form of asthma that persisted into adulthood. Archival footage shows Yoshiki collapsing at the end of a set and crawling across the stage, the black-lace artifice of his costume belying the genuine pain that contorts his facial features. “I was ready to die for X,” he recalls. It’s another claim that sounds like a rock cliché but happens to be true. These days, covered in braces from a career that has ravaged his fragile body, he listens worriedly as a doctor advises him to move as little as possible.

Illness isn’t the only plague that has followed Yoshiki since childhood. He tells a chilling story about coming home one day, at ten years old, to find his father dead of suicide. Yoshiki was already a budding classical musician by then, and his mother bought him a drum kit so he could take out his aggression. “Instead of breaking windows,” he says, “I started banging drums.” It couldn’t be more apparent that the loss of his father set him on the path to rock stardom.

Decades later, two of his bandmates would die by their own hands in circumstances that seem at least partially related to their separation from the group. Just months after X split in the wake of Toshi’s departure, their beloved guitarist Hide was found hanged. The breakup had devastated him, and though Yoshiki still believes Hide’s death was an accident, it was officially ruled a suicide. When the news broke, several young fans killed themselves. In 2011, the band’s ambitious former bassist Taiji, whom Yoshiki fired in 1992 over a transgression he still won’t discuss, hung himself with a bed sheet during a brief jail stint. “I asked him what was the most painful thing to endure,” a Japanese radio host recalls in the film. “His reply was, ‘When I left X.’”

“I think suicide is very selfish,” Yoshiki says. But he, too, spends much of his time thinking about the futility of life and the inevitability of death. “Why am I here? Why am I in this world?” he asks at the beginning of the film. Through candid interviews that draw out the emotional through-line of X’s career rather than build a precise year-by-year chronology, it becomes clear that he’s found his answer in making music. The band also allows him to keep his memories of Hide and Taiji alive. A worldwide reunion tour that culminates in Kijak’s stunningly immersive footage of a 2014 Madison Square Garden show becomes the ultimate tribute to Yoshiki’s old friends, both of whom were driven to seek success outside of Japan.

There is so much pain and pathos in We Are X that you can forget what isn’t a part of the band’s public story: the promiscuous sex and rampant drug use that dominate just about every episode of “Behind the Music.” When Yoshiki mentions ecstasy, it’s because he met an American looking for “X” and thought they were talking about his band. The only romance that merits a mention is Toshi’s marriage to a woman he later came to believe was sent to lure him into the cult.

That’s not to say that their music is sanitized (see: “Standing Sex”), or that everyone in the band is an angel. But any vices they may have are tangential to this story. What drives Kijak’s film, and adds a universal dimension to a singular band’s narrative, is the drama inherent in a group of strong personalities who live for music attempting to create and perform it together. This is every rock band’s struggle, distilled to its essence. We Are X implies that the compulsion to make rock‘n’roll need not be bound up in an unholy trinity with a predisposition towards sex and drugs. It is an artistic impulse as pure as the need to write—and it can wield enough power to keep those in its thrall alive, or condemn them to death.


We Are X is now playing in limited release. Yoshiki and Stephen Kijak will appear in person at screenings in Brooklyn on November 4 and 5.