Translation: Suburban Train (Sons of Sun)

Another of those songs that took a long time to translate because it kept making me cry. Suburban Train (Yanagida/Matsumoto) is one of my favorite songs ever.

I love the way Hiro aligned the words of the chorus into a near-ryhme (郊外電車に, the a-i vowels of ga-i in kougai 郊外 matching the a-i of sha-ni 車に). The euphony was present in Takashi's phrase, but the ingenious emphasis is Hiro's. 



:::



I'm thinking of you

at this very moment.

I bought coffee beans

and a couple of little cakes,

and now the change in my pocket

is jingling.

And now I'm heading back.

I'm on board the suburban train.

Move faster now, come on.

You're thinking of me

at this very moment.

You've adorned the table

with a windflower

and now you're waiting, chin in hand,

for my return.

And now I'm hurrying back.

I'm on board the suburban train.

Move faster now, come on.



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Snow-Light (Sons of Sun)

Aside from his bashful explanation of the notorious Dishevelled Hair mix-up, the only reference I've seen Takashi make to the two albums he wrote for his old Apryl Fool bandmate Hiro Yanagida was along the lines of, "Really, I wrote two albums for Hiro? I don't remember that at all."

Which is insane, because the year was 1972, for chrissakes. The muses were head over heels in love with Takashi Matsumoto, and almost every song lyric emerging from under his pen was unalloyed genius.

But I didn't know that, going into the album. I didn't know what to expect at all. Sons of Sun are so profoundly neglected on the Japanese Internet, let alone the English one, that I thought maybe it was just a repository of practice pieces, something like "outtakes" from the Kazemachi Roman era. Or would it be on the experimental side? — maybe Happy End got the serious, perfected stuff, and this album would just be Takashi messing around, testing out this or that muscle, this or that hint of a direction.

Whatever. It was Happy End-era Takashi. Of course I had to try. I started by working out the opener, Snow-Light (Yanagida/Matsumoto). It was clear to me by the end of the pre-chorus that this was neither an outtake nor an experiment. It was as good as the best writing on Kazemachi Roman.

"Oh, well then," I thought. "Didn't see that coming."

:::

Nighttime in the countryside is awfully boring.

Time passes awfully slowly.

I was thinking of going out for a walk, but...

...the thing is, whenever I do go outside,

before I realize it,

the whole town is covered in snow.

Wind as cold as a knife

comes cutting right through me.

Nighttime in the countryside is awfully lonely.

The pendulum clock ticks and tocks, ticks and tocks.

I smoke a cigarette 

and stare out the window.

The cold wind blows

and howls and howls.

The whole town is covered in snow.

Wind as cold as a knife

comes cutting right through me.

The whole town is covered in snow.

It's floating in the snow-light.

Wind as cold as a knife

comes cutting right through me.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Drifting Clouds (Happy End / Skye)

Shigeru and Takashi's second co-write, Drifting Clouds, was played live but never recorded. Takashi noticed that Shigeru chose not to do anything with it at the Los Angeles sessions, but apparently he didn't protest. He understood: Shigeru had already written new material that he was more excited about. 

Magically, two of the few circulating tapes of Happy End shows happen to have Drifting Clouds on them. They're both rough AUDs, but the band had one of them cleaned up for their comprehensive eight-disc Happy End Box release from 2004. That one's not on YouTube, but here is the other, unofficial one.

Maybe it was that resurgence on the Box that got Shigeru thinking about the song again. He took his time — another sixteen years... 

Earlier this decade, Shigeru's old band Skye (first formed in 1968, two years before Happy End, with Tatsuo Hayashi drumming, Masataka Matsutoya on keys, and Ray Ohara on bass ... notice the line-up similarities with Caramel Mama?) reformed and put out a debut album (they've done more since). Shigeru, who hasn't stayed busy as a songwriter, nevertheless contributed a Suzuki/Matsumoto song called, aha, Drifting Clouds. The lyrics were the same. The melody in the chorus was the same too. But Shigeru slowed the tempo way, way, way down, and completely redid the verses.

The Skye version is one of the most brilliant examples of the songwriting art that I can think of. 

I love poetry. And I love instrumental music. But when you set a text to a melody, something just happens. Or, rather, can happen, if everything goes well. And of course there are many degrees of "well."

When Shigeru was young, and read these words of the young Takashi's, he made a fiery rock song out of them. But Shigeru the old man recognized the timeless aspects of what young Takashi had written all those decades ago. He recognized them — understood them — and set about making a tune and arrangement that would cast them into relief.

The Happy End version is fun. The performance is amazing, of course. But Skye's version is so beautiful that I can't listen to it without crying. (The first three lines is all it takes.) Old Man Shigeru's phrasing on this song is absolutely right on — patient, tender, broken-down — the riff is gorgeous, and Shigeru's voice is fragile this time rather than confident, awed by the moment he's describing.

I think Takashi's lyrics are about something I've lived through just enough times (three? four?) for it to matter: the kind of moment that, in my experience at least, lies at the core of a long-term relationship — the very engine of love, as it were (how's that for a soft rock song title? I love how Matsutoya's keyboard tone in the Skye version keeps the SSSRT torch burning). 

I don't really know how to write about it. I guess what I should say is just: read Takashi's words below, and you'll know. But since I like going on and on and on about things... 

In the years before I got married, I fell in love really, really hard three or four times. And man, did those feelings not want to die. A couple of those relationships had ended early — another two had never made it into the relationship stage at all — and I remember thinking, as my future wife and I started dating, "What do I do with all these leftover feelings? How do I know whether my love for this girl will ever equal what I felt for those others? Is it even fair to her, for me to be with her?"

I've always been the brooding type, so I brooded and brooded, even as the relationship gained its feet. But there came a day when we were staying at her parents' house — we were cuddling in bed in the early evening, nothing too private, the door open to the family and all — when suddenly, something inside me somewhere, or in the world, shifted, and all I could feel for the woman I later married was absolute, total, overwhelming, unadulterated, blindingly obvious love. I couldn't stop staring at her. Her voice seemed to be woven out of pure light. The feeling lasted for an hour or two. The whole time I kept thinking, with as much conviction as I've felt about anything: "I love this woman as much as I have ever loved anybody. Maybe even more." 

The feeling had descended on me, unexpected and unannounced — it lingered a while — and eventually dissipated, things starting to feel normal again instead of transcendent. But I've never forgotten it. 

It's happened another two or three times in the eight years since. Every time, it feels like a miracle. It feels like exactly what life is about — one of the few true reasons that life is worth living, despite everything. And the love that has come over me at those moments is so strong that its traces get me through the relationship's lowest points, the worst of doubts and the worst of arguments, which of course have been many, and frightening. But those moments of all-consuming love and peace are undeniable. If I ever doubt whether the marriage is worth the pain it brings with it, those moments come back to mind.

Like I said, Takashi didn't take Shigeru to task for not recording the song. Maybe he realized Shigeru hadn't gotten it right. But Takashi hung on to these sentiments, these images. The instrumental closer of Apryl Fool bandmate Hiro Yanagida's Sons of Sun record is called Drowsing Doll. The see-through earlobes reappeared on Happy End's third album, in Eiichi Ohtaki's Country Road (props to myself-of-a-few-months-ago for specifying that image as the best in the song). And the song's set-up — two lovers falling quietly, peacefully asleep together, the boy staying awake a little bit longer — got reused, far less effectively, on Chu Kosaka's Hosono-penned Shooting Star City.

The fact that Shigeru ended up recording and releasing a version of Drifting Clouds that did justice to Takashi's words (a version that, at present, you'll find in my top three Matsumoto songs, with Suburban Train and The Marriage Talks — which are both from 1972 as well... god, what a year) is one of those unlikely felicities that only has a chance of occurring when an artist lives a long, long time. By the time he was making the Skye version, Shigeru knew what it meant to live, and to live with pain, and loss, and uncertainty, and everything else that the young couple in Takashi will eventually have to face. Shigeru wrote and sang with it all in mind.

So praise God that there is such a thing as living into your seventies, with your faculties more or less intact, as the J.D. Salinger line goes. May we all be so lucky.

:::

In the shade of the blue and purple trees

you look as peaceful

as a drowsing doll.

Your earlobes are see-through in the sunlight,

bright red and ripe

like wild strawberries.

In the shade of the blue and purple trees

you look as peaceful

as a drowsing doll.

The wet grass is swaying

amid the sound of children's lively footsteps

in the light.

The wind is so gentle, so gentle.

Pretending not to notice you're there,

it plucks a soft kiss

from your lips.

The drifting clouds

float softly away.

I hear the faint sounds of the city.

Daylight drifts down through swaying trees.

Pretending not to notice you're there,
it applies a little light make-up

on your cheeks.

In the shade of the blue and purple trees,

I begin to be

more and more like

a drowsing doll myself.

:::

Postscript, for myself as much as anyone else: this piece, in Japanese, about the Skye version, is fantastic.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Happy End (Continued) (Happy End)

Towards the end of the recording sessions for Blue Valentine's debut album, Haruomi Hosono (a born album artist if there ever was one) had an idea. "Matsumoto, write a poem and bring it to the studio tomorrow. Let's do a spoken word track." The lyricist followed the captain's orders, and the next day, Happy End (Continued) (Hosono/Matsumoto) came together, with a band affiliate on twelve-string guitar and Shigeru Suzuki sitting out.

Takashi has said that, when Happy End fans have interviewed him over the decades, they often find their nerves soothed by the sound of his voice, so familiar to them, after all, from Yudemen's last (and, as far as I'm concerned, best) track.

When I was getting into the band last year, my Japanese was rather worse than it is now, and I thought Takashi was telling a story about and/or narrating a conversation between two tribes of people, happy and unhappy ones. This story or parable was one of the reasons (daily increasing in number) that I felt a need to accelerate my Japanese learning. Except it turns out it's a monologue, not a story — though, maybe still a parable. I think it's a valediction to Yudemen's angst, clearing the way to Kazemachi Roman's confidence and thoughtful nostalgia.

One day, shortly after completing the album, the members of Blue Valentine were in a car together, driving down some Tokyo street, when Hosono suddenly said to the others: "Hey, you know what we should do? Change our band name to Happy End."

The track title typography emphasizes the three syllables いいえ (meaning "no")in the name "Happy End" (はっぴいえんど), presumably as an answer to the rhetorical question Takashi's poem (almost) ends with.



:::



You know, I thought I had forgotten long, long ago
how to pretend to be happy, or joyful,
or lonely, or sad, or in pain.

But now, though I seem to be walking in darkness,
just fumbling my way along,
I think my fingertips sometimes sense
the touch of the thirsty wind upon them.

And at such times, I ask myself —
hey, could it be that you're merely pretending to be blind?

Say — are you really all that unhappy?

Happy end.
Happy end.
Happy end...
(No.
No.
No...)

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Hide and Seek (Happy End)

Contemporary Happy End fans (lore has it there may have been a-as many as twelve of them!) would have gotten little sense of Takashi's poetic capabilities until the following year, but, between Come On, Spring! — Falling Thickly, Piling Up — Happy End — and this here Hide and Seek (Ohtaki/Matsumoto), what they would have had the opportunity to recognize right away was his genius for voice. Nowhere more so than here. Ohtaki embodies the narrator with impeccable nonchalance, dancing around the syllables in a weird and beautiful way (and those backing vocals?!), while Shigeru's guitar percolates along and Hosono holds down the fort, all casual-like. I wish all of Yudemen were this amazing. (As Kazemachi Roman would in fact be.)

In the second line, Ohtaki mistakenly sang "sky" (空 sora) instead of the word on the lyric sheet, "winter" (冬 fuyu). I've followed Takashi's version.

:::

Clouds are floating in the pale dusk sky.

The winter has clouded over.

I'm smoking a cigarette.

The wind has completely subsided.

I'm drinking a cup of hot tea.

Saying "I want you" or something like that

would mean allowing

a slice of a lie, like a long and heavy sigh,

to fall from me.

I'm drinking a cup of hot tea.

How come the snow hasn't melted yet?

The moments that remain inside

the tilted earthenware

are throbbing.

I'm drinking a cup of hot tea.

All right, enough, stop talking —

just shut your mouth and let me be.

It's not like I can hear a word you're saying anyway.

Outside, the world is covered in snow.

Inside, we're playing hide and seek.

Your picture-perfect face is smiling.

I'm drinking a cup of hot tea.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Come On, Spring! (Happy End)

Come On, Spring! (Ohtaki/Matsumoto) and A Rainy Day in December were the first two sets of lyrics Takashi wrote for Happy End. Rainy Day is more or less what you'd expect a precocious new lyricist, steeped in the poetry of his country, to come out with. But Come On, Spring! is something else entirely. It's like if Van Morrison had written Astral Weeks for the first Them album, or if Cheap Day Return had appeared on This Was instead of Aqualung. Nobody's supposed to get this good this soon.

So it's a bit of a relief that Yudemen's powerful opening trifecta is followed by a whole bunch more lyrics where Takashi is clearly just figuring things out. "Ah. He is human, after all." Yeah, sort of, except that less than a year later he was writing Kazemachi Roman, and soon after that, Sons of Sun's Kaizoku Kid no Bouken and The Marriage Talks.

Ohtaki-as-vocalist was, similarly, one of the Seven Wonders of 1970, and he would only get better as the decade wore on.

This song can't but resonate harder for someone living in Japan or China than it would those living in the west — is my guess — in that the weight of the Spring Festival, as the Chinese call it, or Oshogatsu, as the Japanese do, is a hard thing to get a feel for in Europe or North America. From an American perspective, imagine rolling Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve into a single holiday. So when the narrator of the song talks about the bite of loneliness, about how he can't bear to hear the temple bells doing the traditional hundred-and-eight New Year's Eve tolls, he's not being melodramatic.



:::



When you think of New Year's Eve,
you think of everybody
snuggled inside the kotatsu together,
eating rice cake stew
and playing cards.

This year,
I'm greeting the New Year by myself.
The ringing of the temple bells
is so lonely
I have to cover my ears.

If I hadn't fled home,
I could be wishing everyone
a happy new year right this moment.
Did I mess something up
along the way somewhere?

But I put absolutely everything I had at stake.
All I can do now is try my luck.
It can't be long before spring arrives...

can it?

If I hadn't fled home,
I could be wishing everyone
a happy new year right this moment.
Did I mess something up
along the way somewhere?

But I put absolutely everything I had at stake.
All I can do now is try my luck.
It can't be long before spring arrives...

can it?

Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Falling Thickly, Piling Up (Happy End)

You can glimpse the Haruomi Hosono of Kazemachi Roman and beyond in Falling Thickly, Piling Up (Hosono/Matsumoto). Takashi was surprised when Haruomi brought the song into live rotation in 2012, reckoning the decision had to do with the Fukushima disaster. In the version with Ren Takada, Haruomi gently alters the pronoun in the outro, first to "I" (僕が汚した) and then to "you" (君が汚した).

Lest we overlook the studio version, beautiful in its own rough way — how perfect is Shigeru Suzuki's lead guitar?! I wish he could've just gone on playing like this for decades.

:::

A musty, yellowed heart

has fallen on the dirty snow

and is mingling with the trash

at the edge of the street.

I'm fed up with it all.

I want to vanish

into the dirty snow.

I want to become slush.

The white thing that the cars speed through is snow.

The snow that the people trudge through is white.

Behind the city are snowdrifts.

Just then I find myself noticing something

that resonates unusually deeply,

as the snow falls on

in perfect silence.

For some reason, 

everybody thinks it's normal

for the snow piling up in the city

to get dirty.

But that's so stupid.

Who fouled it all up?

Who fouled it all up?

Who fouled it all up?

Who fouled it all up?

(Back to: List of Translations)