Translation: It's About to Rain (Agnes Chan)

It's About to Rain (Hoguchi/Matsumoto) — six glorious minutes long, and one of my favorite songs to listen to when it's raining — is an epic tale of middle school romance. How was Matsumoto so good at this? The dream team helped, no doubt: 

1. Agnes on vocals, of course.

2. Yuusuke Hoguchi (of An Apple Pie Love Letter and Pocket Full of Secrets fame; that's right, Apple Pie comes first, because no matter how much I love Pocket Full, the fact is that Apple Pie is even better) providing exquisitely sad melodies.

3. Makoto goddam Yano himself supplying the dark, dramatic arrangement — Yano was a member of the original Moonriders, but earned his street cred doing the string etc arrangements for Matsumoto & Minami's godly Heroine of the Skyscraper, Agata & Matsumoto's godly Alas, No Mercy, Kosaka & Hosono's godly Horo, Agata & Hosono's godly-beyond-godly Zipangu Boy, and Agata's just-on-the-verge-of-godly I Love You So Much. (And yes, that's right — who can resist city pop gossip — he was Akiko Yano's first husband.)

4. None other than Caramel Mama backing Agnes up — Hosono's basslines in the outro, good lord!!! 

Listening to it, you'd think this song was some vast, cosmic tragedy — and well yes, you could say that from the main character's perspective, it is. And that last verse usually does make me cry.

:::

I wondered how long you'd been waiting for me,
watching the raindrops run down the window.
I took my seat beside you,
and I started to speak to you,
but you didn't look at me,
and you pretended not to hear a word I said.

Where was that dependable smile of mine

when I really needed it?

I couldn't bring myself to say I was sorry.

The library was so quiet that afteroon

that my sigh came out loud and clear.

Outside, the rain

simply won't stop falling.

And I get the feeling that, inside me,

it's about to rain as well.

Now whenever I'm brushing my hair

or chatting with friends —

one way or another, 

thoughts about that afternoon

steal back into my mind.

Should I call you...?

I begin to turn the dial

but my fingers start to tremble

and I get a little scared.

Because — what if you're still angry?

If you don't pick up, I'll cry for sure.

And if you do, what will I say?

I don't have the slightest clue.

So, at last, all I do

is have a staring contest

with the phone.

Outside, the rain

simply won't stop falling.

And I get the feeling that, inside me,

it's about to rain as well.

I'll head to the library tomorrow after class.

I'll sit in my usual seat

and wait for you.

Maybe you'll come —

you'll pretend not to see me —

you'll keep your back turned

and you won't say a single word...

But I've made my mind up.

Tomorrow I'll definitely be smiling —

that's right, smiling — as I say

so softly, "Sorry" —

I wonder whether

you'll forgive me.

Outside, the rain

simply won't stop falling.

And I get the feeling that, inside me,

it's about to rain as well.

Outside, the rain

simply won't stop falling.

And I get the feeling that, inside me,

it's about to rain as well.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Barefoot Adventure (Agnes Chan)

The verses of Barefoot Adventure (Hirao/Matsumoto) are a flagrant rip-off of the Carpenters' Top of the World. It's so obvious that my first few listens were even disturbing: "You mean that, in 1975 Japan, you could rip something off this hard and then put it out as a single?!" It's certainly business-savvy: if it worked in the States, it'll work here?

Later I read an opinion piece that called these marvelously unabashed rip-offs an early version of sampling. It's interesting, anyway. If the resulting song is a good one, then who cares about its provenance? The world needs good songs. And, seven collaborations in, I have yet to hear something of Takashi's-via-Agnes that isn't good.



:::



You were grinning
as you splashed me,
so I pretended
I was drowning,
and now, see?
I've won this chance
to cling to you.

But I wasn't pretending —
it's true, you know!

Whenever we aren't holding hands,

I feel like a tide of sadness

is coming to sweep me away.

Love is the sunlight

glittering in the water.

Put two hands together,

scoop it up.

I was running barefoot

across the burning sand,

rushing to grab hold

of my own trembling emotions.

I didn't need to turn around

to sense that —

oh, don't you feel it,

here it comes! —

happiness itself

was on the verge of

catching up with me.

Love is the sunlight

glittering in the water.

Put two hands together,

scoop it up.

Love is the sunlight

glittering in the water.

Put two hands together,

scoop it up.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Station by the Sea (Happy End)

The Station by the Sea (Ohtaki/Matsumoto) was written in the Yudemen era. It was one of the songs Takashi was most excited about. Ohtaki set it to music and played it nervously for the lyricist, who liked it. But Ohtaki himself remained unconvinced, and in the end it wasn't recorded for Yudemen.

Reluctant to admit failure, however, Ohtaki revived The Station by the Sea as he got to work on his 1972 solo album (a self-titled, but its working title was "Stagecoach", such a vivid and fitting title that that's what I think I'll call the record from now on). He wrote new music, gave the song a swamp rock arrangement, rehearsed it with his Happy End bandmates — and then, apparently still unsatisfied, abandoned it once again. 

Takashi published the lyrics in his 1973 poetry/lyric/essay collection The Wind Quartets, alongside several other Happy End songs-that-never-, or almost-were. 

And that was the end of that.

But then, last year, someone in the Happy End archival camp stumbled on a solo acoustic demo of the 1970 version of The Station by the Sea. According to a Daisy Holiday conversation between Haruomi Hosono and Shigeru Suzuki themselves, the plan is to release the demo on a new Happy End EP (!!!) that will also feature Downpour City and a couple other, yet-to-be-recorded 21st century Suzuki/Matsumoto and Hosono/Matsumoto songs.

A new Happy End EP...

of original songs...

with Matsumoto on drums...

Some things sound too good to be true, and this may yet prove to be so.

P.S.  Most of what I know about The Station by the Sea's mysterious history stems from this incredible series of posts by the Internet's foremost Ohtaki scholar.

P.P.S.  For hibachi (a kind of brazier), see wikipedia.

:::



It was late at night

when I reached the station.

The damp wind bit into my skin.

A naked light bulb swayed

above the wooden platform.

An elderly attendant

warming himself by the hibachi

accepted my ticket

in his wrinkled hand.

I saw a worn-out man reflected

inside the sooty glass.

Memories of summer

brushed past my ears.

The town I walked through

felt familiar.

I turned a corner

and all at once

I was overcome

by the smell of the sea.

Garbage was scattered across the beach.

It fluttered in the wind.

I lay down on sand so cold

it didn't seem to me

I had any chance of falling asleep

before sunrise.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: I'm Inside the Kotatsu, Waiting for Spring (Chu Kosaka)

I'm Inside the Kotatsu, Waiting for Spring (Kosaka/Kosaka) — or just Waiting for Spring, as the song is known on Country Pumpkin — is among my favorite Kosaka songs. The arrangement of the backing vocals is brilliant, and no song on Motto Motto makes it clear how powerful a unit Four Joe Half was, quite like this one. No wonder Haruomi Hosono elected to keep [most of] the band for himself.

:::



The sound of footsteps
comes clip-clopping down

from the clouds.

In due time,

the main street in town

will be similarly bustling...

I'm inside the kotatsu,

waiting for spring.

The snowmelt too,

any day now,

will go flowing

through the valley

as far as the foot of the mountains...

I'm inside the kotatsu,

waiting for spring.

Here under my grayish roof,

the ends of the floral-print kotatsu quilt

hang downwards,

one across from the other...

I'm inside the kotatsu,

waiting for spring.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Because I Love You (Chu Kosaka)

Because I Love You (Kosaka/Kosaka) is the ecstatic set closer, followed on Motto Motto by a Kosaka + Hosono duet version of Spring is Here. One of those songs where I'd welcome the outro being twice again as long. As would the protagonist! But the way the song seems to fade out even in a live arrangement, I think the implication is that the sleeping woman went on sleeping a while yet. 

I love how gently Kosaka and Matsutoya play together on the verses, the quarter-note strums cuddled by the quarter notes on piano.

The band name Four Joe Half is a pun on 四畳半 (yojouhan), a four and a half tatami room, an expression that I think was still a literal reckoning of size in the 1970s, and has since become proverbial for "the smallest and cheapest apartment possible". So maybe the "spacious room" in these lyrics is ironic. But since the song was most likely written in Sayama, where all these musicians accustomed to Tokyo city life could suddenly be living in entire houses of their own (whence the awe-struck/bemused album title Hosono House), the room probably was spacious — a whole lot of space for just one married couple.



:::



It's raining.
The copper pheasants' song
fills up the morning.
You're sound asleep.

The windows have clouded over.
The color of the curtains

is white.
And the rain goes on falling,
quietly falling.

I want to stay like this
longer, longer.
And I want to hold you
closer, closer.
I want to be with you
just like this
longer, longer.
Because I love you...

I wonder whether
you're still dreaming 

here in my arms.
Our spacious room
is all filled up 

with a grandfather clock
and broken toys.

I want to stay like this
longer, longer.
And I want to hold you
closer, closer.
I want to be with you
just like this
longer, longer.
Because I love you...

I want to stay like this —
with you, together —
longer, longer.
And I want to hold you
closer, closer.
I want to be with you
just like this
longer, longer.
Because I love you...

It's raining.
The copper pheasants' song
fills up the morning.
You're sound asleep.

The windows have clouded over.
The color of the curtains

is white.
And the rain goes on falling,
quietly falling.

I want to stay like this
longer, longer.
And I want to hold you
closer, closer.
I want to be with you
just like this
longer, longer.
Because I love you...

I want to stay like this
longer, longer.
And I want to hold you
closer, closer.
I want to be with you
just like this
longer, longer.
I want to stay like this —
with you together —
longer, longer.
And I want to hold you
closer, closer.
I want to be with you,
be with you just like this
longer, longer.

Because I love you...


(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Huge Keyaki Tree (Chu Kosaka)

Chu Kosaka's vocal melodies are often simple and minimal, but even when they are, they sound so right. I don't know how he does it. There's a fine line between boring and meditative, and Kosaka (especially in this early period) likes to keep it in view, but always ends up on the "meditative" side, both feet planted firmly on the earth.

I don't know the context for the collaboration, but the words to The Huge Keyaki Tree (Kanzawa/Kosaka) are credited to Toshiko Kanzawa, a celebrated writer of children's literature. Wikipedia lists a book of the same title published in 1976. Perhaps this particular poem came out early, and Kosaka got permission through Mushroom to release the song...? An online search didn't turn up much.

:::

The huge keyaki tree —

the one out in

the open field —

rustles in the wind.

Long ago,

ninjas used ninjutsu

to leap right over

huge keyaki like that.

"Hmmm. Did they now?"

rustles, rustles, rustles

the tree.

The huge keyaki tree —

the one out in

the open field —

rustles in the wind.

Long ago,

ninjas used ninjutsu

to turn themselves into

huge keyaki like that.

"Hmmm. Did they now?"

rustles, rustles, rustles

the tree.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Garden's Nice and Warm (Chu Kosaka)

In 1971, Chu Kosaka signed a "three albums in three years" deal with his label Mushroom. He didn't quite manage to get enough songs together for the first of the three, Arigatou, which is why his best friend Haruomi Hosono ended up contributing three songs.

Then, before you know it, it was 1972, and Kosaka — an incredible songwriter, but not a fast one — had written exactly three new songs. Or, okay, four, if you count one called Waiting for Spring, which he'd contributed to the Hosono-produced Japanese country music supergroup project Country Pumpkin (Hosono had two of his own originals on there, one of which likewise found a second home on Hosono House). But even counting Waiting for Spring, four new songs did not an album make.

Solution: record a Tokyo show with the touring band you put together in your artist commune neighborhood, to whom your wife gave the name Four Joe Half, most members of which (drummer Tatsuo Hayashi, keyboardist Masataka Matsutoya, and pedal steel guitarist Hiroki Komozawa) would head next door the following year to record Hosono House and (in Hayashi & Matsutoya's case, while Komozawa stuck around as an adjunct) become Caramel Mama.

The album was Motto Motto (kind of untranslatable out of context: maybe "More, More", echoing the audience's demands as a concert ends; but the phrase is drawn from the lyrics to Because I Love You, and nowhere in my English version does the phrase "more, more" appear as such; literally, it's something like "[Grammatical Intensifier], [Grammatical Intensifier]"). 

Six songs from Arigatou, one from Country Pumpkin, and the three fully new ones. 

Hosono and Shigeru Suzuki showed up too, guesting on a couple tracks, and received rapturously by the audience — I guess if you were at a Kosaka show in 1972, you knew who Happy End were!

The new songs on Motto Motto — including this one here, The Garden's Nice and Warm (Kosaka/Kosaka) — are so awesome that I wish there had been more of them — ideally, enough for a second album in the uber-gentle folk-barely-rock Arigatou vein. The third Mushroom Kosaka album, 1973's Hazukashi sou ni, is terrific in its own right (ten new Kosaka originals!!!) but it's already leaning folk-soul — not a bad thing! It's only that Kosaka was leaving the Arigatou/Motto Motto sound behind. 

On Arigatou, Kosaka's city boy reveries-slash-travelogues of the country could be totally convincing or transparently fake, but come Motto Motto, the Sayama countryside had seeped into the blood. The quiet domestic bliss in the new songs is as real as it gets. I love that, in the first verse, Kosaka's wife is pissed off at him — mind you, they stayed together until Kosaka's death.

A note about the cat: when I was translating Arigatou, I really wanted to mention the fact that Hosono's cat was given him by Kosaka. What is friendship, if not the offer of a cat from your household to adopt?! But I couldn't find an appropriate place to mention it. 

Well, and now here it is: that's Omi-chan's cat who has slipped into his former caretaker's garden. 

:::

If you open the window,

the gentle fragrance

of winter daphnes

comes indoors

and even your angry expression

turns into a glad one.

The garden's nice and warm.

I'm feeling cheerful.

The garden's nice and warm.

I'm feeling cheerful.

If you open the window,

the gentle fragrance

of winter daphnes

comes indoors.

The cat from next door

is stretched out in the sun,

half-asleep.

The garden's nice and warm.

I'm feeling cheerful.

The garden's nice and warm.

I'm feeling cheerful.

(Back to: List of Translations)