Naruyoshi Kikuchi (菊地成孔, Kikuchi Naruyoshi in Japanese order) was born on 14 June 1963 in Choshi, the fishing port at the eastern tip of Chiba Prefecture. His father ran a diner and his mother came from a sushi family, and he grew up in Kannon-cho, the district of cinemas, cabarets and strip theatres, helping out with deliveries. His brother, fourteen years older, is the novelist Hideyuki Kikuchi. As a teenager he wanted to direct films, played bassoon in his school orchestras and a civic orchestra, and listened to classical music, AOR, jazz and bossa nova.

He came to the saxophone late. After leaving a university literature course he enrolled, at about twenty, at the music school Mezer House and took up the instrument there. He sat in on the Sophia University jazz society and spent time in the jazz cafes near campus, and by 1985 he was playing professionally, first as a last-minute third saxophonist in the backing band for a Fifth Dimension concert at the Yokosuka US naval base. From 1986 he played in Tipographica, the band led by the guitarist Tsuneo Imahori, whom he had met at Mezer House. At twenty-five he played with the pianist Yosuke Yamashita at a memorial concert for the late tenor saxophonist Takeda (武田和命), followed Yamashita on tours abroad, and from then on worked seriously as a jazz musician. He is credited on tenor saxophone on Yamashita's Playground (Verve, 1993), and Japanese Wikipedia has him joining Yamashita's New Trio that year.

The 1990s were a decade of overlapping bands. He is on baritone saxophone on Ichiko Hashimoto's D.M. (Polydor, 1989). In 1992 he founded Spank Happy with Midori Hara and Shin Kono, a pop and club project. In 1995 he joined Otomo Yoshihide's noise-and-jazz band Ground Zero, on whose Plays Standards (1997) and Consummation (1998) he is credited. Around 1998 he started Date Course Pentagon Royal Garden (DCPRG), and with the pianist Masayasu Tzboguchi he formed Tokyo Zawinul Bach, which made Live in Tokyo and Hamlet on the Highway (Uchu Records, 2001). He also became the tenor saxophonist in Otomo's New Jazz Quintet, on Flutter (Tzadik, recorded February 2000), ONJQ Live (DIW, recorded at Shinjuku Pit Inn on 17 March 2002) and Tails Out (DIW, 2003). He is also the tenor saxophonist on a 1999 live album by Sachi Hayasaka, Black Out! (Live at Buddy), which is billed with Yamashita.

DCPRG's first run produced a body of long, dense, rhythm-driven records: Report from Iron Mountain (P-Vine, 2001), the live Musical from Chaos (2003), Structure et Force (2003) and Franz Kafka's Amerika (2007). Kikuchi composed and produced them and led from keyboards, turntables and the conductor's chair rather than the saxophone, over two drummers, guitars, a tabla player and a horn section. The group ended that stretch with a concert at Shibuya O-East on 25 April 2007. Meanwhile Spank Happy, relaunched in 2000 as a pop duo with the singer Hitomi Iwasawa, came to an end in October 2005.

In 2004 he announced a "return to jazz." The result was Degustation a Jazz (EWE, April 2004), his first record under his own name, forty-one short pieces, each a bite-sized "tasting," subtitled in French as a postmodern jazz album of the twenty-first century. It runs from atonal cool-jazz pieces for alto saxophone, bass, drums and harp to a hip-hop break piece with soprano saxophone, a blues for string quartet and tenor saxophone, two pieces in the manner of Charles Mingus, and a live "You Don't Know What Love Is" from Shinjuku Pit Inn. A French-language companion EP and a second version, Authentique/Bleue, followed in the same year. Over 2004 and 2005 he also lectured at the University of Tokyo, on jazz and twentieth-century American history and on Miles Davis, and the transcripts were published. In 2006 he began teaching jazz theory and history at Kunitachi College of Music and the next year at Tokyo University of the Arts, and in 2002 he had already opened a private school, the Penguin Music University.

A trip to Buenos Aires for a magazine feature on Latin music, where he heard bandoneon players and the Leopoldo Federico orchestra in the tango clubs, shaped the next record. Elizabeth Taylor en Amérique du Sud (EWE, 2005), recorded between September 2004 and March 2005, has Kikuchi's compositions played by a string quartet, harp, two pianos (Hiroshi Minami and Tzboguchi), the bandoneon player William Sabatier, the cornetist Kasper Tranberg, Otomo Yoshihide on guitar, Hiroaki Mizutani on bass in part, and the singer Kahimi Karie. To play its music he formed a twelve-piece small orchestra, Pepe Tormento Azucarar, whose first album as a group was La Pensée Sauvage (2006), followed by Estudios de Síntoma de Pérdida de Memoria (2008), New York Hell Sonic Ballet (2009), Before and After the War (Senzen to Sengo, 2014), a ten-years compilation in 2014 and Pubis Angelical (2024).

In July 2006 he and the singer UA made Cure Jazz (Speedstar), a standards album billed as UA × Naruyoshi Kikuchi, with Kikuchi as producer and liner-note writer, that includes "Night in Tunisia," "Over the Rainbow," "Born to Be Blue," "Luiza" and "I'll Be Seeing You." They made a follow-up, Cure Jazz Reunion, in 2014. In 2007 he formed the Dub Sextet: two horns in the line of the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet plus a dub engineer who processes the band live. Shinpei Ruike was the trumpeter, Tzboguchi the pianist, Masato Suzuki the bassist, Tamaya Honda the drummer and Pardon Kimura the dub engineer, and the records are The Revolution Will Not Be Computerized (EWE, December 2007), Dub Orbits (July 2008) and the live In Tokyo (November 2008). In 2009 he recorded a duo album of standards and improvisations with the pianist Hiroshi Minami, Flowers and Water, with a string quartet arranged by Neko Saito.

DCPRG returned in July 2010 with a largely new line-up that included Ruike on trumpet (the keyboardist Tomomi Oda joined in 2014), and in 2011 Kikuchi signed with Impulse!, the label that released the band's live Alter War in Tokyo (recorded at Liquid Room in Tokyo on 6 June 2011, with the guitarist Arto Lindsay as guest) and then Second Report from Iron Mountain USA (March 2012). Japanese Wikipedia describes him as the first Asian jazz musician to sign with Impulse!. In 2010 he also formed the hip-hop crew Jazz Dommunisters with the writer Yoshio Otani; their album Birth of Dommunist appeared in 2013.

He built his own infrastructure around the music. In 2011 he set up a personal office, Bureau Kikuchi, which was incorporated in 2013, and in December 2013 he launched the label Taboo under Village Music, which released Pepe Tormento Azucarar's 2014 album, Cure Jazz Reunion and DCPRG's Franz Kafka's South America (2015). As producer for Taboo he made the pianist Junko Onishi's Tea Times (2016). He was also a broadcaster, hosting the TBS Radio programme Kikuchi Naruyoshi no Iki na Yodenpa from April 2011 until its final broadcast on 29 December 2018, and a prolific author, whose first essay collection, Supein no Uchushoku, appeared in 2003.

Screen scoring is the other large part of his output, and the part most listeners abroad have heard. He scored the anime Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012) and Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt (2015 to 2017), whose jazz-driven soundtrack was widely noted, and from 2020 the NHK adaptations of Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan and the film Rohan au Louvre. Discogs tags the two Gundam Thunderbolt soundtrack albums as jazz, and the second also as free jazz.

The Dub Sextet ended its first life in 2017 (as a septet, with the trombonist Itsumi Komano added) and DCPRG disbanded after a concert on 2 April 2021, but Kikuchi kept going: a Quintet from 2020 that accompanies his voice and scat with ambient improvisation, an instrumental dance-music band from 2022, the unit Q/N/K with the singer QN, a collective of former students called Shin Ongaku Seisaku Kobo, a 2024 Dub Sextet reunion and a tour of Blue Note Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo that ran into April 2025, and the film and television scores that continued into 2026. He is not to be confused with the pianists Masabumi Kikuchi or Himiko Kikuchi, who are both profiled here and are unrelated.

Kikuchi's own phrase for his schooling is "the Miles Davis department of the Godard faculty," and the two names are the key to him. Miles Davis, above all the 1960s quintet and the electric records after it, is the spine of the Dub Sextet and DCPRG; Jean-Luc Godard, and cinema and critical theory in general, is why his records come with concepts, French subtitles, Borges and Susan Sontag in the track titles and a habit of treating an album as an essay. One reviewer of the Dub Sextet's debut heard eclectic jazz with dub effects that disrupt the sound without overwhelming it, a dose of neo-bebop, a cool west-coast-flavoured ballad, and more Ornette Coleman than Miles Davis on one track.

The range is wide and each strand has its own band. The Dub Sextet is a two-horn hard-bop group with a dub engineer; Pepe Tormento Azucarar is a chamber orchestra with a taste for tango, bandoneon and salon music (Discogs tags its records as Latin jazz, opera and easy listening alongside jazz); Degustation a Jazz and Elizabeth Taylor en Amérique du Sud are avant-garde jazz in short and long form, Discogs filing the latter under avant-garde, free and Latin jazz; and DCPRG is a large band built on repeating funk grooves, played at length and sometimes tagged jazz-funk or future jazz. On saxophone he is a tenor player first, with alto, soprano and baritone in the credits.

His identity is not purely a jazz one, and it would be misleading to present it that way. Japanese Wikipedia opens by calling him a musician, saxophonist and writer, not specifically a jazz musician. A good part of his public career is as a pop producer and songwriter with Spank Happy, a radio host, an essayist and critic, and a composer for anime and television. The jazz case rests on the weight of his own-name records: Discogs tags Degustation a Jazz, Elizabeth Taylor en Amérique du Sud, Cure Jazz, the Dub Sextet albums, Flowers and Water and the Gundam Thunderbolt scores as Jazz, while his pop singles and several screen scores are tagged Pop or Stage & Screen. His saxophone credits run through Yamashita, Otomo and Hayasaka, he has taught jazz theory and history at conservatory level, and Wikidata and French Wikipedia both describe him as a jazz musician. The jazz is real, but it is rarely presented straight.