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)

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.

All my eyes reflect

are 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...

(Back to: List of Translations)

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 a little afraid — has been surpassed. I don't 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, it could just be that — as Ursula Le Guin wrote about making art in old age — pure physical fatigue makes the journeying hard, and 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.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Dusk (Sons of Sun)

By the time I was on Dusk (Yanagida/Matsumoto), Takashi's third Kaizoku Kid no Bouken song, I was spellbound. The songs were not only as beautifully composed as Kazemachi Roman, they felt gentler and more personal. Which meant that Takashi had written two masterpieces back to back (or maybe even three... or, possibly, four? and a half? but more on all that later).  One became known as an all-time great album, while Kaizoku Kid no Bouken never even became a cult classic — but that's the listeners' fault. Sure, Sons of Sun are not Happy End — no one is. But you can't ask for more gorgeous settings of Takashi's words than those Hiro and his band provided.

The souvenirs and octopi bit (おみやげをみっつ   たこみっつ) is another reference to children's rhymes (see also A Flower Costs One Monme and May the Weather Tomorrow Be Good). The words are a segment of a spell that you would say to encourage someone to keep a promise.



:::

Laid out in the distance

up on top of the hill,

the chimneys of the houses

that resemble wooden playing blocks

are spitting smoke into a sky

suffused with orange sunset.

The sky, stained red,

is as still as death.

Children are hurrying home.

"Three souvenirs, three octopi..."

No matter how long I wait, though,

I can't spot the first star of the evening.

An old man stands

off in the distance,

puffing on a big seaman's pipe,

drawing the orange sunset 

into his lungs.

The sky is as still as death,

its colors fading.

Children are hurrying home.

And though both the frogs and the crows are done singing,

no matter how long I wait,

I can't spot the first star of the evening.

No matter how long I wait,

I can't spot the first star of the evening.

I hear the whistle of a train

in the distance.

The chimney

of what resembles a toy train

is spitting smoke into a sky

suffused with twilight, all ultramarine.

The sky, stained blue,

is as still as death.

Children are hurrying home.

Feels like tomorrow it'll be spring for sure.

(Back to: List of Translations)

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.

And 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.

And 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.

And 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 Marriage Negotiations — 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.

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Translation: Happy End (Continued) (Happy End)

Towards the end of the recording sessions for Valentine Blue'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 Valentine Blue 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...)

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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.

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Translation: Come On, Spring! (Happy End)

Come On, Spring! (Ohtaki/Matsumoto) and A Rainy Day in December were the first two songs 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 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 Marriage Negotiations.

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

I think this song has to resonate more for someone living in Japan or China than 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 sting 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
inside the kotatsu together,
eating rice cake stew
and playing cards.

This year,
I'm greeting the New Year all alone.
The ringing of the temple bells
is so lonesome
I have to cover my ears.

If I hadn't fled home,
I could be giving everyone my best wishes
right this moment.

Did I mess something up
along the way somewhere?

But I put absolutely everything I had at stake.
All that 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 giving everyone my best wishes
right this moment.
Did I mess something up
along the way somewhere?

But I put absolutely everything I had at stake.
All that 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!



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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?

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Translation: Remember the Enemy: Thanatos! (Happy End)

A crazed psychedelic shakedown closing Side A, Remember the Enemy: Thanatos! (Hosono/Matsumoto) sounds like little more than an excuse to unleash Shigeru Suzuki. Hosono remembered thinking, "Wow, Matsumoto wrote a lot of words. I guess I'll just shout them out without any melody."

Working on the translation was a drag, since the lyrics are neither easy nor interesting, but — completionism again — I forbid myself from doing any of the great Yudemen songs before I finished this one.

A really faithful version would have required more effort than I was willing to give, so line for line the translation may often be off, but I think it gets the mood across. As it happens, Hosono himself wasn't faithful to Takashi's lyric sheet. The main point of the song is probably not any given line or verse so much as the nervous, feverish, psychedelic piling-on of weird and gloomy images.

:::



The tearful green moon

crept in through the cracks

as I was drifting off to sleep.

I could feel something coming toward me,

cleansing the room as it moved.

Rain blew and beat against

the floorboards and the walls

and the quiet sound of their breathing.

It was a very strange night.

Time flapped its wings,

looking off in every direction.

February drifted by,

so dizzyingly deep as to seem bottomless.

An enemy was present,

exploding with energy,

as cold as glass,

a cold screw slumbering

behind a curved needle.

It was a very strange night.

A warm futon!

I needed to be wrapped up snugly

inside a warm futon!

I was so cold.

What was the resentment aimed at? What?

Gasping in pain

at the bottom of an explosion of glass.

It wasn't the least bit funny,

but I still felt like laughing.

Silence fell.

It was a very strange night.

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