JAPANESE BREAKFAST: A RECKONING WITH MORTALITY

Michelle Zauner, who performs as Japanese Breakfast, has had a year to remember. Her third LP, Jubilee (Dead Oceans), released to universal critical acclaim in June, picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album while also propelling her to a Best New Artist nom. Jubilee appeared just two months after the publication of her well-received memoir, Crying in H Mart (Alfred A. Knopf), based on her 2018 piece in The New Yorker; both deal with her grief at losing her Korean-born mother to cancer. The book debuted at #2 on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Orion Pictures will make Crying in H Mart into a feature film, with Zauner writing the screenplay and providing the soundtrack. The September release of the video game Sable, soundtracked by Japanese Breakfast, was the icing on the cake for this gifted polymath.

What was your reaction when you found out you’d been nominated for Best New Artist?
My poor neighbors! It was a lot of screaming and running around my apartment in complete and utter disbelief.

Do you have any thoughts about your fellow nominees in Best New Artist and Best Alternative Album?
I’m delighted to be in such wonderful company. Best Alternative Album has always been my favorite category, and it’s a real gift to be counted among such a diverse batch of icons.

What would it mean to you to win in either category—or both?
It would feel as if I’d reached the summit of achievement in my craft.

You’re an author, music-video director and video-game composer as well as an artist. What’s the source of your creative ambition?
I’ve always been a very sensitive person. I feel deeply moved by the human experience, and there’s always been this hunger in me to relate to other people through some type of creative narrative. I also think I doubled down on my creative ambitions after my mother passed away. It was a real reckoning with mortality and how much I wanted to make sure to say before it was too late.

Your art is intensely personal. What’s the connective tissue between Jubilee and Crying in H Mart and which came first?
I began work on Crying in H Mart years before Jubilee. It just so happens that the book was published two months before the album came out. For me, the connective tissue between them is that Crying in H Mart recognizes and recounts the trials of grief and loss, and Jubilee is about beginning to move on from that experience, learning to prioritize joy again.