One nice thing about being a westerner getting into Haruomi Hosono is the lack of context. There isn’t much available in English. Apparently there are some interviews and contextual bits in the Light in the Attic reissues of certain albums, including this one, but I don’t have access to those. Generally, all you can do is listen to the music and imagine the rest for yourself.
So it was a surprise to watch the “No Smoking” Hosono documentary (with Chinese subtitles) and learn that Hosono felt Paraiso was an artistic step back from the heights of Tropical Dandy and Bon Voyage Co. Those, he says, were made under the influence of the amazing music he was just then discovering. But no vine of inspiration can produce fruit forever, and Paraiso was made in the wake of its wilting. He felt himself bogging down in something... and ended up taking a legendary trip to India with his friend Yokoo Tadanori — India, where Hosono contracted the dysentery that he believed would amount to a spiritual cleansing as well as a physical one but which, once he’d contracted it, he thought would kill him; India, where he saw his first UFO; India, out of which came his next album, Cochin Moon.
The funny thing is, listening to Paraiso, you’d never guess that it is a more desolate or somehow less inspired affair than the first two installments of what people came to call the Tropical Trilogy. It’s as fiercely colorful as the two before it. The Hiroshi Sato / Ryuichi Sakamoto piano/keyboard/synth team meeting the Tin Pan Alley family makes for an outrageous and beautiful sound. There are plenty of very happy songs. Can someone listen to Tokyo Rush and not smile? How many listens does it take before Asatoya Yunta starts melting any listener down into delighted mush? And is Worry Beads not one of the most uplifting songs ever recorded?
But now that I’ve got done translating the lyrics of the Tropical Trilogy into English, one difference does become clear.
Lyrically, the whole affair started with a burst of longing: Nettaiya (Sultry Night) on Tropical Dandy, a drifty city blues about wishing you were on a beach in Trinidad. At first Hosono thought he’d arrange it like a song by The Band, thus carrying on with the spirit of his first solo album, Hosono House; but a chain of events led him to recast himself as Harry “The Crown” Hosono, the white-suited and mustachioed Tropical Dandy himself. The remaining songs on Dandy were full of whimsy and fantasy: about being a kung-fu hero pursuing a rival across the desert; or a castaway who believes he sees his hometown beneath the waves as he poles his raft along; another that’s sort of about being a member of the moon race, vacationing on earth...
Bon Voyage Co kept things light and playful too, for the most part. On both albums, the darkest that things get is in bright-sounding songs with lyrics about animals destined for slaughter: a soon-to-be Peking Duck on Tropical Dandy, and on Bon Voyage Co, a dog who thinks little of the fact that, come dawn, he’ll be butchered for food. Bon Voyage Co also has Hong Kong Blues, with the opium addiction and the exile from East Asia; but that’s a cover tune.
Bon Voyage Co ends with a song in which, to comfort a grieving partner, but maybe not only to that end, the narrator gazes up at the moon and tells of the gondola he sees drifting up there in that sea of light. The album’s final line of lyrics is, “Let’s get on,” and after it’s sung, the cheerful reggae rhythm gives way to an ambient outro, Hosono falsettoing along, as the song’s two characters get on board and sail up and away from the sad realms of earth...
All through Paraiso, we’re deep inside the longing that the Exotica Lullaby characters are able to jump out of: they do make it up to that gondola. In Paraiso, the narrator is left waiting at the pier, aware that, try as he might, and desire it as he might, he won’t manage to make the jump; the boat won’t come. Or if it does, it’ll be in that gray and distant “someday” of Paraiso’s closing verse, and in the future tense of its amazing chorus:
From the pier, I'll leap aboard a ship hailing from a distant land —
adios, farewell! —
and blow a kiss to the lights of the city,
gazing at them as I would at a woman's face...
The lights of the city: of Tokyo, of course — which is to say, we’re back where we began with Tokyo Rush. But in the opener, the narrator emphasized the trips out — to Honolulu, and, wonderfully, Hong Kong (of all the places to go when one needs a break from high-speed urban livin’) — while the narrator in Paraiso admits, with resignation, that he’ll probably stay forever — “I could get used to living here, if I had to...”
Even the pier where he waits for this ship that will, supposedly, someday come pick him up, can only be reached in dreams. The second verse makes explicit that the paradise of the album’s title is a mirage. The band can travel there, sure enough, on Sakamoto’s insane synthesizer blast, but then it all melts away and we’re back inside the same gentle rhythm and sway. Never mind all the talk of paradise, it’s time to grow old.
If you re-examine the album in the light of its closer, you notice other things.
Shimendoka, taken on its own, is as hopeful and energizing as songs get, Hosono dismissing the demons that roam the road to holiness in chorus after chorus. “The way may be full of flowers or it may be full of storms. It doesn’t matter. I’m going.” But if you think about Paraiso and the ship that never comes (no matter how many languages the narrator says “goodbye” in), you may notice that each verse in Shimendoka starts with a conditional: “In the morning, I’ll set out.” “When the flowers are in bloom, I’ll set out.” “When the winds come blowing, I’ll set out.” “And when night falls, I’ll arrive.” All “when [A] / I’ll [B]” formulations. Strictly speaking, the narrator hasn’t gone anywhere. He feels ready to get moving, but it doesn’t mean he’s moving.
The gamelan meets drum machine instrumental, Shambhala Signal, makes me think of a pilgrim or spiritual searcher up on some lonesome mountain road, who suddenly hears the strains of a song: music from Shambhala, the holy city, whose people are calling him: “This is the end of your travels, you’ve found us, we’re here! Come!” The music sounds like it’s emerging from just behind the next rise, or from between the trees, or behind them, somewhere closeby, the entrance to the city is near: but he can’t seem to find it. The music speeds up towards the end because the gates are closing. “Quickly! Come quickly!” But he doesn’t make it, and the song's abrupt ending is like the sound of the gates slamming shut.
It's a fitting end to the Tropical Trilogy. If it’s Tokyo you need to get away from, sure, you can take that relaxing trip to Hawaii. But if it’s earthly sorrows you’re trying to leave behind, there’s nowhere physical you can go. Nettaiya’s Trinidad has to be a Trinidad of the heart: and so there’s Worry Beads, one of the most beautiful songs Hosono ever wrote, in which he asks us to accompany him to the deserts of the moon (to return there, specifically, which makes me think he might be talking about childhood) so that we can plant the seeds of the desert inside our heart, so that they can bloom later, when we’re back in exile again. And when they do bloom, back on earth — as they will, the singer suggests, if instead of fighting and struggling to relieve your troubles and worries, you acknowledge them and count them and accept that they’re going to stick around, since after all, worry and suffering walk hand in hand with love (hence those beautiful lines, “The first bead for that child’s sake / The second bead for this child’s sake,” so mellifluous in Japanese) — well then, anything becomes possible, because (as Tolstoy phrased it) the kingdom of God is within you. “You can go anywhere, any place at all you can think of, you can go soon, you can go right away.”
In a sense, then, Worry Beads is the album closer. It’s the solution to the problem; or if not quite that, it’s still the most spiritually profound moment in the trilogy. It fades out on the choir chanting along with Haruomi, “Om namah chandraya, shantih, shantih, chandraya,” (“a Sanskrit mantra dedicated to the Hindu god of the moon, Chandra, its repetition said to bring clarity, insight, perspective, and calm, especially in times of confusion and distress”), so many voices lifted alongside his — it reminds me of Richard Dawson gathering his friends to sing the outro of The Hermit, another great moment of spiritual light.
But, marvelously, Worry Beads isn’t the closer, Paraiso is. Paraiso is the return to reality, the comedown after the vision. Ordinary, earthly reality is what you have to live with for years and years, even — especially — when the seeds of a spiritual vision are planted in your heart. In Paraiso we have the human longing for escape from sorrow into paradise after all, a longing that persists even when you know for sure that you can't get there.
Hosono describes the escape route for us, but it’s buried under so many layers: he has to be dreaming, first of all; he has to dream of that one particular fantasy, second; he has to stubbornly chase the fantasy until he reaches the pier, third; and fourth, even when he makes it all the way to the pier, he still needs to wait for the ship to come. But for all that — and for all his disarming resignation, the “tomorrow I’ll try and fail again” — each chorus is packed full of goodbyes, as if he were truly leaving. “From the pier, I’ll leap aboard,” says the narrator. And blows the city — the vale of sorrow — a goodbye kiss.
The easygoing rhythm of the song belies the understated but urgent despair in the lyrics, and the resignation, the hope, the imagined joy.
I’ve barely mentioned the album's music. It's glorious — what else do you expect from Hosono?
(Nic from Critter Jams has more to say about the music. Go read.)
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