Translation: The Kittens of the Apple Forest (Mari Iijima)

Back when I was translating a Matsumoto song or two a day, 1983 felt like a wasteland, and wound up making me feel pretty discouraged. "Is this all he amounted to in the '80s...?" It felt so thin and obvious by comparison with the mystical masterpieces of the early '70s (and I was immersed in them just then, listening to the Sons of Sun record several times a day, etc). 

And okay, sure, Takashi's later work doesn't have much in common with Dusk or Suburban Train. But yesterday I found myself rereading those '83 translations (so far: My Heart Goes "Kyun" for You, It's Springtime Mon Amour, and Morocco) in the midst of a Fleetwood Mac bender. The Mac's lyrics tend to peak at serviceable — though some lines are touching or inspiring, and there are a few songs that, as a whole, hit hard (looking at you, Beautiful Child) and of course the words feel wonderful to sing. But all in all, they tend toward the plain. Fleetwood Mac were never about the lyrics.

Takashi lyrics, by comparison — even in 1983 — are surprising, full of detail, and clearly differentiated from each other. You'd never confuse the narrative voices in those three songs, or the circumstances of their respective stories. Even in 1983. And so, suddenly heartened, I revisited another '83 song, which I'd finished but hadn't posted. And it turns out that, yeah, this one is good too. 

The Kittens of the Apple Forest (Tsutsumi/Matsumoto) is the ending song of the anime adaptation of Alf Prøysen's Mrs. Pepperpot stories. As is typical of the era, the anime is better than its source material. 

The singer is Mari Iijima. The anime's OP/ED duo was her first single. Her debut album, Rosé, was produced and arranged by Ryuichi Sakamoto, but from that album onwards, the songwriting was her own.

:::

The kittens of the apple forest

invited me to a super fun party,

full of the clip-clop of the creatures

who tap-dance in wooden clogs

and the chorus of a band

of little birds up in the boughs.

I love you, dear Aunt Spoon!

Now come on, let's dance together.

I love you, dear Aunt Spoon!

Come on, let's go — it's Shape Up time.

Look here! 

Maybe we can't see happiness directly,

but we can join hands with it

and spin, spin, spin.

The duck in a silk hat dances

to the beat of the bear drummer's drum.

Everyone's smiles look like they'll

split right off their faces.

But what else would you expect?

It's Auntie's birthday!

I love you, dear Aunt Spoon!

Your bashful eyes are beautiful.

I love you, dear Aunt Spoon!

And I want my life to be like yours.

Look here!

We're spinning,

spinning in a circle

at the tippity top of the world.

The kittens of the apple forest

invited me to a super fun party,

full of the clip-clop of the creatures

who tap-dance in wooden clogs

and the chorus of a band

of little birds up in the boughs.

The kittens of the apple forest

invited me to a super fun party,

full of the clip-clop of the creatures

who tap-dance in wooden clogs

and the chorus of a band

of little birds up in the boughs,

and the chorus of a band

of little birds up in the boughs.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Quiet Here, Isn't It? (Hiro Yanagida)

Quiet Here, Isn't It? (Yanagida/Matsumoto), my favorite song on the album, opens Side B. I looked it up early into my Takashi obsession because I figured a 1972 song with that title had to be awesome. It took a few listens to hear the soul in Hiro's untrained voice, but the melodies and the arrangement won me over at once (those backing vocals, ahhh!).

:::



How quietly the meltwater reverberates.

It just waits there, motionless.

It seems to have nothing much to say.

Quiet here, isn't it?

When I strain my ears,

it's like I can even hear

the murmur of your heart.

Quiet here, isn't it?

Take a look out the window

and see how slowly the time goes by.

There is nothing missing now, nothing lost,

and you're getting sleepy.

Quiet here, isn't it?

When I strain my ears,

it's like I can even hear

the murmur of your heart.

Quiet here, isn't it?

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: I Passed through Your Town (Hiro Yanagida)

The bittersweet vibe continues in I Passed through Your Town. I love Hiro's bright arrangement, all ska horns and infectious group vocals. At "but I heard," the backing vocals disappear and it's just beautiful, frail Hiro singing alone.

Instead of adding a final verse, Hiro lops off the last two lines of Takashi's lyrics, which I've restored in this translation. I'm not sure the grammar makes sense with the lines gone; if it does, I think it turns the narrator instead of the town, which goes unmentioned, into the one "smothered in autumn light."

:::



Twilight is passing by.
A town the color of dead leaves
is reflected in the window of the train.

The wind that blows in through the window
smells of memories.
I close my eyes and hear your voice.

But I heard someone say
you don't live in this town anymore.
Even if you don't, though, it doesn't matter.
You know I can see you regardless.

On each and every street corner,
I could find the shadows
that you left behind —
and convinced of that,
I turn around.

The town flies by
smothered in autumn light.
Nighttime steals up 

on my eyes.



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: I Think I Can Smell the Wind Burning (Hiro Yanagida)

Given how much the image of wind meant to Takashi in the Kazemachi period (and continued to), one commenter in Japanese wondered whether the title of I Think I Can Smell the Wind Burning (Yanagida/Matsumoto) alludes to to the disintegration of Happy End. The timing works out. The mixture of weariness and beauty in Hiro's arrangement and vocal delivery gives it the right mood too. "It's all so lovely," but the imagery is violent.

This came out the same year as Hiro, Takashi, and Mao's Sons of Sun album, and while the songwriting voice is recognizable, it's a very different sort of record. On the one hand, Hiro learned from his mistake and got Takashi lyrics on every song with vocals. On the other, half the running length is instrumentals: two solo piano pieces that lean abstract; one fun bit of lounge/surf/exotica (or maybe just samba, as the title suggests), and ten minutes of free jazz to close.

:::

Sure enough, it's summer.

The light is brimming over.

The sky is so blue that it hurts.

The sunlight gathers even in your dimples.

It's all so lovely, isn't it?

The green is melting.

The green is melting.

The streets flicker like fire

in the sunlight

and I think I can smell the wind burning.

Try tossing your straw hat in the air.

— There! See?

Sure enough, it's summer.

The exploding light

bakes and sizzles

in the blue of the sea.

The green is melting.

The green is melting.

The streets flicker like fire

in the sunlight

and I think I can smell the wind burning.

Try tossing your straw hat in the air.

— There! See?

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Mysterious Traveling Circus (Sons of Sun)

The Mysterious Traveling Circus (Yanagida/Matsumoto) is one of the central songs of the Kazemachi / Town of Wind era. It doesn't mention the Town, but it gets at the same ideas from a different starting point.

Ostensibly about a circus troupe (like another of my favorite songs on earth, Places Where You Never See the Snow by Antonia and Peter Stampfel... here's a shoddy, but well-meant, cover by a musician with the initials S.A.S., and a live version by Peter himself), but the splendid images the narrator lines up one after the next, verse after verse, are just imaginative extrapolations. He's never seen the circus. The whole song is based on hearsay. The terse refrain reveals that the narrator is trapped in the dismal prison of a bland family and a bland town. The circus never actually comes; it's up to him to dream it up.

Just as it was up to the twenty-year-old Takashi to overlay the fantasy-construct of the Town of Wind onto the dismal, depleted neighborhoods of post-Olympics Aoyama. But when he cast the spell, he cast it carefully and thoroughly, much like the boy in The Mysterious Traveling Circus, whose conjured-up circus is more vivid than any I've ever been to.

Haruomi Hosono got caught inside Takashi's spell too. A lifelong Tokyoite, Hosono has said that there were only two times he ever truly loved the city: first, in the Happy End era, between 1970 and 1972, when it seemed to him that he really was living in Takashi's mystical Town of Wind; and again for a brief spell in 1975, when his rediscovery of Martin Denny and exotica helped him look at Tokyo the way he felt dazzled foreigners of yore must have seen it.

Hosono's described the period of explosive creativity leading up to Tropical Dandy as a high that lasted months; and the magic of living in the Town of Wind was so sweet that (like the way I think about opium daily even though it's been a year since I was hospitalized and got morphine in my IV drip), years later, he was still chasing that feeling. "The Professor wrote a song about Tokyo for our second album, called Technopolis. I tried to brainwash myself into believing that that's where I was living, a cybernetic city of the future. Like I'd once lived in the Town of Wind... but it didn't work."

Getting back to this Sons of Sun song... for reasons that I bet will be lost forever to the mists of time (unlike the mystery of No Wind's parrot), Hiro Yanagida had an odd penchant for cutting the lyrics of Takashi songs a little bit short — though "penchant" may be unfair, I think it only happened twice. One of those times is in this song's refrain. Takashi's original text has a two-line refrain, which goes: "Shut your children away / inside a house that never dreams" (子供を隠せ　夢をみないうちに) — an injunction to parents, warning them against the threat of the circus, coming to upend the customary order of things.

For the Sons of Sun version, Hiro excised the first half, leaving just "inside a house that never dreams," repeated twice. Unlike his other edit, in I Passed through Your Town, I think this was an inspired move — not because the refrain is better without its first half, but because it shifts the focus in an interesting way back to the narrator himself. When there's no reference to the parents, the refrain turns into a dose of elegiac self-reflection, its grammar inconclusive, as if the constraints of the family home were so tight that the narrator, describing it, can't even find the space to articulate a full sentence.

Another variance is that in the third verse, Mao sings of a saffron sky (サフラン色). The LP lyric sheet concurs. But in Takashi's original text, as published in The Wind Quartets, the word is "scarlet sage" (サルビア色). I suspect Hiro saw a four-character katakana word beginning with サ and his mind read saffron. Takashi's image is far the more vivid one.

So this translation is a bit of a mongrel, keeping the chorus as Mao sings it (to reflect the eerie power of that curtailed chorus line), but restoring the color of the sunset.



:::



I hear that whenever

that amazing traveling circus comes around,

the whole town goes into an uproar.

When they're putting up their dark tent,

even the wind comes howling by.

The sound of the orchestra's clarinet

paints the dusty signboard

in rainbow colors.

The ringmaster in the bowler hat is laughing.

Inside a house that never dreams.

Inside a house that never dreams.

I hear that whenever

that amazing traveling circus comes around,

the whole town goes into an uproar.

When someone's swinging on that dark trapeze,

even the wind comes howling by.

Inside a house that never dreams.

Inside a house that never dreams.

The clown dances

an ecstatic dance,

his red clothes fluttering

in a sunset of scarlet sage.

The ringmaster in the bowler hat is laughing.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Drifters' Elegy (Sons of Sun)

I think one of the hardest tasks a songwriter can have is writing convincingly in the collective voice. Anytime I hear a "we" that apparently means to include me, I think, "Who the fuck are you to speak for me? Speak for yourself." But Takashi nails it.

In fact, The Drifters' Elegy (Yanagida/Matsumoto) doesn't mean to include me at all, it pushes me away. But the song's poetry is so beautiful, and the speaker so arrogant in his antagonism, and his plight so romantic, that I wish I was one of that "we."



:::



Let's go! — though this gang of ours is shabby and broken.
Let's go! — wearing worn-out, badly-fitting shoes.

The blistering summer's clear blue sky
has been blown high up by the wind.
Let's go, come on!
As far as the far end of that sky.

Hey! Tear yourself away from that cute girl.
Tell her that we're drifters
and that there's no falling in love with a drifter.
Wherever we go, the wind drives us away.

Let's go! — riding the first train of the morning.
Let's go! — aboard the last train of the night.

The heartless autumn's crimson sky
violently coughs up fire.
Let's go, come on!
To the town with its skin burned off.

Hey! Tear yourself away from that cute girl.
Tell her that we're drifters
and that there's no falling in love with a drifter.
Wherever we go, the wind drives us away.

Let's go! — riding a rickety city bus.
Let's go! — clattering down the city streets.

The dark winter's ashen sky is behind us,
and the whole world covered in snow.
Let's go, come on!
— smiling like a bunch of nihilists.

Hey! Tear yourself away from that cute girl.
Tell her that we're drifters
and that there's no falling in love with a drifter.
Wherever we go, the wind drives us away.



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Goodbye America, Goodbye Japan (Happy End)

It's disingenuous to call this a "translation," but for consistency's sake...

For a while I was under the misconception that Van Dyke Parks had produced the third Happy End album. He very much did produce the album closer, Goodbye America, Goodbye Japan, but I think that was approximately the extent of his involvement. He showed up drunk, lectured the band on the evils of the Japanese emperor, and then arranged their new song for them, confusing Matsumoto and blowing Hosono and Ohtaki's minds in the process. 

Back in Japan, wanting to figure out what the hell had happened that fateful day in Los Angeles, Hosono started listening obsessively to Parks' solo album Discover America. It had a massive influence on the Tropical Trilogy. Hosono and Parks became friends, and stayed friends. Check out the love in their eyes in this absurdly beautiful performance, from sometime earlier this century. As if Hosono and Parks on one stage didn't equal enough legends, note that Sakamoto is playing keyboards and Miharu Koshi accordion. Parks gives Koshi's shoulder a shake on his way offstage.

When I first heard the last Happy End album, I was living in the hospital (or should I say a kind of paradise...), dosed out on morphine. I was listening to nothing but early Hosono, early Ohtaki, and Happy End. This final album sounded really weird coming after Kazemachi Roman — "great songs," I remember thinking, "but what the hell's wrong with the arrangements?" But then I reached the closer, and had my mind blown right open, and so I went back and listened again — and again — and again...

The most beautiful thing about it isn't even the music, or not the music alone. Takashi's lyrics consist of only four distinct words. And yet I think the song is one of his most moving.

It's an anthem of liberation. Home hadn't worked out for them, and neither had the United States, the country that the artists who inspired them most — Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, Jimi Hendrix — all hailed from. Where the band members would go from there didn't matter. This was the final song on their final album. What mattered was the understanding that the chains of the place they had come from, as well as of the place they had dreamed of, were shattered. For at least as long as it took to write and record and sing the song, anything at all was possible, and everything was clear.

In 1985, soon after Hosono's great Yellow Magic Orchestra experiment had ended, Happy End reunited for exactly one show. It was the only time they all played together in the years between their final concert in '73 and Eiichi Ohtaki's death forty years later. The setlist was a synthpop medley of four songs, one from each vocalist, followed by Goodbye America, Goodbye Japan with a massive chorus of backing singers that included Hosono signees World Standard and Miharu Koshi. But the band's original idea had been to perform just Goodbye America, Goodbye Japan, for twenty minutes straight. "We didn't think the audience could have handled it," Hosono sighed, "but that would definitely have been best."

:::

Goodbye, America. 

Goodbye, Japan.

Goodbye, America. 

Goodbye, Japan.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

(Back to: List of Translations)