How Shōgun Became Takashi Murakami’s Latest Pop Culture Muse

Even by the standards of one of the most ubiquitous figures in contemporary art, Takashi Murakami is having a banner year. After a well-received solo run at London’s Gagosian, he transported his Japonisme, Cognitive Revolution exhibition—featuring his reinterpretations of 19th-century master Utagawa Hiroshige—to the gallery’s Manhattan outpost. This spring, he collaborated with Major League Baseball on a capsule collection that blended his iconic technicolor florals with classic American sports memorabilia. Then came the triumphant reissue of his cult-favorite 2003 collaboration with Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton—this time fronted by Zendaya— heralding the 63-year-old’s reintroduction to a new cohort of consumers as a maestro at the intersection of art, commerce, and cultural zeitgeist.

“I’m very happy that my work has been received well with the younger audience,” Murakami tells W through a translator. “It makes me really hopeful that I can still, a little bit longer, communicate with the new generation.”

We’re speaking just ahead of the debut of Stepping on the Tail of the Rainbow, his largest state-side exhibition in two decades, on view through September 7 at the Cleveland Museum of Art. An expanded version of his 2022 show at The Broad in Los Angeles, the presentation features over 100 works—paintings, sculptures, and large-scale installations—charting the evolution of Murakami’s kaleidoscopic practice.

That includes pieces like the instantly recognizable “Hustle’n’Punch by Kaikai and Kiki” (2009), which exemplifies the artist’s trademark 2D Superflat style, his pantheon of memorable characters, and his ongoing dialogue between high art and pop culture. For fans of that side of Murakami—the one that draws on the energies and aesthetics of manga, anime, otaku culture, and kawaii motifs with whimsical irony—the exhibition offers an immersive return to form.

But at the heart of the show, installed in the museum’s central atrium, is a markedly different kind of project: an architectural collaboration rooted in Murakami’s enduring fascination with Japanese history and its connection with the West. That interest was recently rekindled when he began watching the Emmy-winning series Shōgun, set in 1600s Japan during a time of political upheaval following civil war and during the country’s first significant contact with the West. Struck by the production’s lush visual language and emotional depth, he found himself captivated not only by the story but by the set design’s reinterpretation of the country’s Azuchi-Momoyama period. The series resonated with him so deeply that it sparked an idea: what if he could recreate one of Japan’s most sacred architectural landmarks as a living artwork?

Working with American Shōgun creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, Murakami set out to recreate the Yumedono, or Dream Hall, from Nara Prefecture’s Hōryūji Temple Complex. The original structure holds special significance in Japanese history, as it was built on the site of the possible home of Prince Shōtoku, who is believed to have converted his father, Emperor Yōmei, to Buddhism in the late 500s CE.

“Takashi is a curator of his own history, truly,” Marks says. “He gave us the template of inspiration for the Yumedono. We were able to take his plans, his vision, his designs, and then reconcile them to the reality of the setting.”

“I was really taken by the art in the [Shōgun] set,” says Murakami, who speaks gently and with his eyes closed. “If it was purely done by the Japanese team, they would’ve really dug into how it was historically accurate, or they would've considered the budget. But for this particular production by the American team, they really grasped the rough idea of the Azuchi-Momoyama era. They got the sense and nuance of what it was like, but then they made it into a huge dynamic expression. I thought, ‘Oh, this is how the best of American expression looks like.’”

He was so “enormously, explosively” influenced by the series, in fact, that it inspired his recent Gagosian shows, too. He was particularly moved by the series’ depiction of seppuku, and the repetition of the death poem read before a character commits ritual suicide. “The story being told was the ephemeral nature of the human beings living in that time,” he says. “The sense of life and death of the Japanese people was visually expressed in a very quiet, dynamic way. I was very moved.”

Upon entering the CMA exhibit, visitors are guided into the Yumedono, which doubles as a kind of spiritual vestibule. It houses four new Murakami paintings depicting the Four Symbols, mythical guardians of Kyoto—the Black Tortoise, Blue Dragon, Vermillion Bird, and White Tiger. “The space is protected on all four sides by the sacred deity beasts,” says Murakami. The pieces combine his original sketches with AI-generated images to create something new—another embrace of modern and traditional, high and low.

The structure is an entrance to a mini-retrospective that follows, an experience that both Murakami and Shōgun production designer Helen Jarvis, who worked closely on the Yumedono’s construction, hope influences the overall experience. "I hope that we have created an initial sense of wonder as people take in and approach the structure, as if the Yumedono has landed like some heavenly spacecraft in the light-filled atrium,” Jarvis tells W. “I like the idea that through it, they are entering a portal into the extraordinary exhibition of Takashi’s work that follows."

As for Murakami’s next pop collaboration? As his translator says with a smile, “He wants to be in Shōgun season two.”