YUU
AMEMIYA

An experiential author who writes literature not to be read, but to be lived.

He writes novels about futures that may one day arrive—and then opens those fictional worlds so they can be physically experienced in reality.

These experiences take many forms, including festivals, immersive theater, exhibitions, and films. Participants enter these spaces as inhabitants of the story, observing, moving, and acting within the world. Through their collective presence, a single fictional world temporarily materializes in real space.

This form of living literature—experienced through all five senses—has been developed under the name Experiential Novels, spanning numerous works. Notable examples include KaMiNG SINGULARITY, set in a world where AI has become god, and RingNe, depicting a world in which humans reincarnate as plants.

In his long-form works, participants live together as residents of a fictional world over a period of three years. Short-form works include one-day experiences such as Mud Land Fest, set in a “country of mud,” and Dance Furoya, a danceable public bathhouse that heats both water and dance floors.

Amemiya is also known as a pioneer of silent disco culture in Japan. He is the founder of Japan’s largest silent event brand, Silent it, and serves as CEO of Ozone, a creative company dedicated to “maximizing opportunities for imagination.”

He has produced over 100 projects across Japan, many of which have been featured by major media outlets including NTV’s Sekaiichi Uketai Jugyo and TBS’s Nichiyobi no Hatsu Mimi Gaku, generating widespread attention for their distinctive worldbuilding.

Kamakura Shikyosai, a festival inspired by ritual practices of the Kamakura period, was nominated for the JACE Event Award alongside events such as the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. He also received an honorable mention in the Future Society with Superintelligence Scenario Contest for a work envisioning life 50 years into the future.

As a creative director, Amemiya collaborates with companies and public institutions across Japan, developing projects and businesses that bridge art and commerce. Alongside this work, he continues to cultivate fields, DJ, write novels, make films, stage living funerals, and create relational art.

In terms of physical spaces, he founded Escape Bar White Out in Yokohama in 2020, and launched Ozone-so in the Odawara area in 2025—reversing previously created fictional worlds from extraordinary occasions (hare) into everyday life (ke).

He considers the creation of places to escape—and the facilitation of escape itself—as his life’s work. He has held his own living funeral four times. While escaping, while creating, he lives by drifting through the in-between.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, reports showed an increase in domestic violence during stay-at-home periods. When people are confined to narrow worlds, they tend to become aggressive. In wider worlds, we can be kinder. “There are invisible wings called kindness,” sings Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. We humans are creatures who can be granted invisible wings through imagination. At times, those wings are called kindness.

The act of creation practiced by an experiential author is an attempt to bestow these invisible wings upon oneself—and, if possible, upon others as well. Just as some people see Shibuya as a workplace, others as a playground, and others still as a place to sleep, any place contains multiple layers. The same is true of what we call a “world.”

The world I see, the world the person beside me sees, the world a cat sees, and the worlds no one has yet seen—if we can take flight with the wings of imagination and engage with worlds beyond our own, we can all live within a kinder world. That continuous act of reaching outward expands the overall size of this world, creating new places of belonging for someone, somewhere.

Let compassion be our propulsion. Let doubt become lift.
In the sky reached by the wings of imagination, let there be a celebration of life.