Roppongi Museum 10:00
¥2,500, college, high school and junior high students ¥2,000, elementary school students ¥1,300, younger children free
The Roppongi Museum invites visitors to step into a parallel past this summer with the chilling and poetic ‘1999: Memories of a Day that Doesn’t Exist’, which runs from July 11 to September 27. Inspired by the apocalyptic prophecy of Nostradamus, who famously predicted the world’s end in July 1999, the exhibition explores a question both eerie and alluring: what if it really happened?
Brought to life by the newly formed horror creators’ unit Bermuda 3 – novelist Sesuji, Siren screenwriter Naoko Sato and rising director Masaki Nishiyama – the exhibition offers a sensory narrative that blurs the boundaries between memory and imagination, and reality and fiction.
Guests are led by a mysterious ‘End-Time Girl’ through immersive environments and surreal soundscapes into a world suspended in time: a forgotten room in 1999, phantom voices from a vanishing landscape, and visions from a train window that never existed.
Illustrated by animator and illustrator Mai Yoneyama, the exhibition culminates in a limited-edition short story written by Sesuji, gifted to those who experience the ‘end’. At once unsettling and strangely beautiful, this otherworldly journey dares visitors to remember what never happened, and discover who they might have been.
