Hard Core

Disasters and Road Trips in Search of Meaning

living road, 2025. Installation view of “SIDE CORE: Living road, Living space.” at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2025.

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road.

There’s a stretch of road that hums with the melody of a song when driven over. Grooves cut into the its surface vibrate with the sound of a television drama and theme song about a family fleeing Tokyo for the solitude of somewhere nearby. That show, Mare, ended in 2015 but the song seemingly lives on. And this Melody line, as it’s known, reverberates through the local Ishikawa landscape with a shrill reminder of how geography and culture sometimes meet.