November 02, 2024

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 would 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)


October 31, 2024

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?

October 23, 2024

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.

October 22, 2024

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)


October 20, 2024

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 as I listened to it the first time, "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.


Translation: Rendezvous (Sons of Sun)

Rendezvous (Yanagida/Matsumoto) opens Side B with shimmering folk-rock (which is such a cliche, but how else would you describe this arrangement?) that makes way for a bizarre and wonderful psychedelic bridge, the one moment on the album that hearkens back to Hiro Yanagida's psych rock past.

Before I investigated the lyrics, I thought the long breaks between the lines in the verses (as delivered by Mao, Sons of Sun's androgynous German-Japanese vocalist) were strange, but after I did the translation, the same pauses came to feel beautiful and natural.

Suburban Train is my favorite song on Kaizoku Kid no Bouken, but I think this one comes in second.



:::



For a long time now,
and all too late,
the only thing I've been able to think about
is coffee.
Even as they roll the rays of the sun like dough,
my fingertips are stiff with cold.

See how slowly
the coffee I spilled
glides over the frozen summer...
and oh how pleasantly.

For a long time now,
and all too late,
the only thing I've been able to think about
is you.
My eyes reflect nothing
but the silhouettes
of a city made of paper.

See how slowly
the shards of the love you mislaid
glide over the frozen pavement...
and oh how pleasantly.

For a long time now,
and all too late,
the only thing I've been able to think about
is love.
My lips cling to love
but emit only smoke.

See how slowly
the love song I'd forgotten about
glides over the frozen pavement...
and oh how quietly...


October 19, 2024

Translation: The Pirate Kid's Adventure (Sons of Sun)

In the write-up for Hosono's song No Wind, I brought up how the liner notes credit Takashi Matsumoto with "inspiration" for the parrot on the narrator's shoulder, and that when someone asked Hosono for details, decades later, he couldn't answer: "I've totally forgotten."

But now I've stumbled on the answer.

No Wind — in which a sea voyage is an allegory for the band's own figurative and literal journeys — was clearly inspired by The Pirate Kid's Adventure (Yanagida/Matsumoto), the title track of this Sons of Sun album, which came out between Kazemachi Roman and the third Happy End record. The song the parrot in No Wind is singing is probably this very one. "It has the feel of some old poem," Hosono's loving description goes.

The Pirate Kid's Adventure is an allegory for Takashi's own voyage as a writer. He's young, and the entire ocean is stretched out in front of him. It's not clear whether he'll reach that treasure island or not, but his spirit is ready to try.

It's a beautiful way to to describe someone who'd just got done writing his first masterpiece. No one could say what lay ahead. The pirate kid had to set sail and find out for himself.

In No Wind, there's talk of a whole crew, but the pirate kid sails alone. By the time Takashi was writing the words, Happy End had probably already made the decision to disband.

The narrator in No Wind can't remember how the parrot's song goes, because The Pirate Kid's Adventure is a song about endless possibility, while the crew in No Wind had just about reached the end of their line: "And if there's no wind, captain? Then what?"

Hosono was a competitive kind of guy — it's clear from his history with friend-rivals Eiichi Ohtaki and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Apryl Fool, the band Hosono and Matsumoto were in before Happy End, had broken up because of creative differences between Hosono and Hiro Yanagida. So when Yanagida wrote his own album with Matsumoto, releasing it just a few months after Kazemachi Roman, it figures that Hosono was paying attention.

Moreover, Hosono has said he was nervous about his lyrical contributions to the third Happy End album. He wrote all of Hosono House in Matsumoto's shadow too, constantly worried whether his own lyrics were good enough. He leaned into wordplay for the L.A. Happy End songs specifically to avoid unfavorable comparison with Takashi. So it makes sense that another way Hosono might have covered his bases is by using existing Matsumoto songs (specifically, Sons of Sun songs) as springboards for his own. If the criticism came up ("man, your lyrics can't compare to Takashi's!"), Hosono would be armed with the self-abnegating answer: "Yeah, duh, I'm just writing my own versions of Matsumoto songs anyway."

Matsumoto had written an allegory about a sea voyage (The Pirate Kid's Adventure) — okay, so would Hosono (No Wind). Matsumoto had written about drifters (The Drifters' Elegy) — okay, so would Hosono (The Wanderer). But though the topics were similar, Hosono's chosen method (heady word-play) would set his songs apart.

Sharing an Umbrella, which was originally intended for Hosono House, not Happy End, has a less clear connection to Matsumoto specifically, but it lifts a whole line ("tomorrow's a day off") from one of the Sons of Sun songs that Takashi didn't write. Unless both that lyricist and Hosono were referencing a third source...

And to make the interconnections still more fun, a detail in the lyrics of The Pirate Kid's Adventure might actually draw inspiration from a slightly older Hosono song, Festival of Mud, recorded the previous year for Chu Kosaka's Arigatou, with Matsumoto drumming.

In the lyrics to Festival of Mud, there's a (probably accidental to start with, but then fully embraced) shout-out to Happy End's lead guitarist Shigeru Suzuki, who also plays on the track. His given name, Shigeru, appears in the lyrics, and when Hosono sings that word/name, Shigeru's electric guitar answers.

Here in The Pirate Kid's Adventure — appearing prominently at the end of a line, just like in Festival of Mud — we hear Matsumoto's given name, Takashi (though with different kanji — in this case, a literary form of the word "high," as in "the weather is clear but the waves are high," a line quoting a telegram sent by the very-soon-to-be victorious admiral Heihachiro Togo at the Battle of Tsushima, in the Russo-Japanese War).

I'll end with a personal note of awe: as a description of the field of eternal possibility that is art, I don't think "the sea is so wide / the sea is so wide / the sea is so wide / and so huge" — breathless, delighted, disbelieving, full of anticipation, maybe even a little afraid — has been surpassed. I have no doubt that's exactly how Takashi felt at the age of 22, with two albums behind him and a third in the making. It's how I still feel at 34, nine albums in.

Maybe things start to feel different after a certain point. Maybe the borders of each sailor's ocean eventually come into view. Or maybe not, maybe it's just that — as Ursula Le Guin wrote about making art in old age — pure physical fatigue makes the journeying hard, while the ocean remains as wide and as huge as ever.



:::



I'm setting sail
for a treasure island
that's unimaginably far away.
There's a yellow parrot
on my right shoulder.
My eyes have the gleam
of a pirate kid's.

The weather is clear
but the waves are high.
Granted, there's a skull and crossbones on my flag.
The sea is so wide.
The sea is so wide.
The sea is so wide
and so huge.

I'm setting sail for the seven seas.
The anchor's going up.
The sky is cloudless,
the ocean endless,
and I'm a pirate kid.

Red and blue and yellow:
the colors of the waterspout
that shoved the kid we were speaking of just now away.
He lifts his left hand,
brandishing the keys that now are his,
and challenges Peter Pan himself
to a friendly match.

The weather is clear
but the waves are high.
Granted, there's a skull and crossbones on my flag.
The sea is so wide.
The sea is so wide.
The sea is so wide
and so huge.

I'm setting sail for the seven seas.
The anchor's going up.
The sky is cloudless,
the ocean endless,
and I'm a pirate kid.


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 voca...