Shortly after learning about the death of Tohru Okada, one of the six men who made up the seminal and somewhat unbelievable Moonriders, I learned that he'd released an album only a few years ago that I'd never heard about.

To understand how strange this is, you'd need to understand the depths of my Moonriders obsession: I track this band like a hunter tracks prey, poring over new announcements from its members on a semi-monthly basis, and have kept tabs on everything down to their live shows for the better part of a decade. I have a playlist of its members' music that's over six days long; on more than one occasion, I've written a record publisher directly, asking if we can arrange some kind of import. For one of its members to release new work—and not just work that he played on or produced, but work that (to use a problematic phrase) is his—without being noticed is...

Well, for Tohru Okada, it's somewhat unsurprising, really. Okada, more even than his bandmates, has a penchant for disappearing behind names that aren't his own. A look at his album credits on Discogs reveals a dizzying 360 titles, including separate long lists of work for "writing and arrangement," "production," and "instrumental performance," but that list—I know from experience—is frustratingly incomplete. It includes his experimental pop trio Ya-to-i and his accordion ensemble, Life Goes On. It briefly hints at the existence of his electronica project, CTO LAB, and misses most incarnations of Chiroline, the girl-group band he formed whenever he'd written music that he thought a girl-group should sing. It completely misses Ukulenica, a surprisingly lovely ukulele quartet, and also skips the album he created using the vocaloid Hatsune Miku, which he did using the Americanized alias Thomas O'Hara. Beyond that, it's hard to tell what's undocumented, because there is no reliable authority on Tohru Okada's works: every fan site, every record company's log, is missing more than it includes.

The more you describe a Moonrider's musical history, the more it sounds like you're flat-out making things up. That's true of the Moonriders themselves, it's true of its individual members, and it's truer of Tohru Okada than it is of anybody else, both because Okada's range of musical interests was eclectic and inexhaustible and because he seemingly found it easier to express himself through other musicians than as a solo artist of any kind. Only one album, 2016's aptly-named Portraiture of T, ever carried his name without embellishment; his earliest work, without fail, billed itself as The "Unforgettable" Sound of Tohru Okada, quote marks and everything, and revolved around a theme of some kind, as if he was selling a music library rather than an album proper.

When you look at his work with Moonriders, with whom he recorded for nearly 50 years, Okada gets more elusive, not less. He's there from the very beginning: the band's first recorded song, Anu Musume No Love Letter, is credited to him. When the band pivoted to its breakthrough jittery New Wave sound in Mania Maniera, Okada is again credited with writing the album's legendary opening track. He wrote lush, heartfelt rock; he wrote ballads that segue implausibly into funk. He wrote one of the band's most moving and soulful songs, and then, a decade later, rewrote it as a sunny pseudo-reggae beach jam. When the band was ready to make its farewell in 2011, Okada wrote what was meant to be its farewell song, a deceptively simple and happy song whose layers are as subtle and hard to pin down as the man himself.

On what may be the band's magnum opus, 2006's Moon Over the Rosebud, Okada contributed the stunning Vintage Wine Spirits, and Roses, a mostly-acoustic number with hints of tropical sounds, whose laid-back pace conceals surprisingly powerful emotion. But it was his other contribution, WEATHERMAN, that sometimes feels like a summary of Moonriders, and of Okada himself, in a nutshell. WEATHERMAN's layers pass over and across each other like, well, weather fronts: elements which are strikingly dissimilar from one another alternate, meet, contrast, and merge, passing over a melody whose rhythms and harmonies seem to reflect and contain everything around it. It's hard to pin down, hard to reduce to a single genre, hard even to work out where its components might otherwise belong.

I'm not sure whether "unforgettable," as in "The 'Unforgettable' Sounds," was meant as a nudge-and-a-wink or whether the choice of keeping it in quotes was some cultural or linguistic fluke. It always seemed funny, placed in front of works that seemed intentionally constrained to a very specific and arbitrary sound: here is the "dream vacation" album, here is the "imaginary film scores" album, and so on. More broadly, it seems funny to call Tohru Okada's sound "unforgettable," when it's impossible to say what his sound actually is. (One of his last released songs, on Moonriders' 2022 "comeback" album, is, if anything, even more impressively enjambed than WEATHERMAN, with the band coming off more than ever like a classical sextet working with non-classical musical styles.)

But that elusiveness, that ever-shifting nature, that seeming willingness to embrace anything and everything that "music" could mean, was exactly what made Okada such an essential part of Moonriders—and likely what made Moonriders the band they were. There's a fundamental generosity to his music: a friendliness, a sweetness, that can seem trivial at first brush, until you give it time and realize just how much intelligence, just how much care, he put into everything he touched. He helped Moonriders become a band whose nature changed, not just between releases, but between every individual song, and oftentimes within them. Left to his own devices, his albums and bands seem almost like dreams of albums, ideas of bands, briefly given form by somebody whose unique gifts let him make almost anything seem possible.

His Chiroline albums are exquisite, which is not a word I'd ever think to use in conjunction with a poppy girl group. Ukulenica's music manages to make ukuleles seem like versatile instruments with surprisingly intelligent uses. Hatsune Miku Sings Moonriders is fascinating, not in its reinterpretation of old songs or in its adaptation of new production technologies, but in the ways that Okada finds to reinforce the old with the new, embracing newer sounds without restraint or shame, but inventing new ways to do the old ideas justice. (And what other 70s rocker would spend part of the 2010s programming a robot singer to cover his old songs?)

These are not just fascinating artifacts of Tohru Okada's sound. This is Tohru Okada's sound. This is the canon of a man who wrote for others and through others, not because he was unable to perform himself, but because it was through others that his feelings and dreams seemed to take form.

It's almost hard to say I miss him, when I know full well that I'll be discovering new albums and obscurities of his decades from now, scattered into spaces I can scarcely think to search through. But of course I miss him just the same. The world has lost a strangely-invisible giant; he is gone, but not forgotten.