Translation: A Flower Costs One Monme (Happy End)

Venturing into Kazemachi Roman now — the middle album, the most celebrated. It's not my favorite, the third album is, but they're both pretty much perfect. The debut is great too. Happy End was one of the best bands ever.

Shigeru Suzuki, who contributed so much crucial stuff to the final album, made his songwriting debut here, with A Flower Costs One Monme. It marked the fulfillment of Haruomi Hosono's ideal: being in a band in which everyone wrote songs (for which see also, a mere six years down the line, the Yellow Magic Orchestra). 

I think that, because it was Shigeru's first recorded song, his bandmates seriously stepped things up (and, probably for the same reason, Shigeru's guitar solo is sublime). Matsumoto's lyrics have no chorus; nothing repeats until the last moment (and oh man, when it does). Hosono's bassline is beautiful. And Ohtaki, to whom Shigeru turned for help with harmonies, wrote three entirely different harmony lines, one to go with each chorus.

The lyrics are a portrait of collective childhood, about how it felt to be growing up with friends in a particular Tokyo neighborhood, but it's universal too — the races through town, the street shows, the role playing. It's about the way childhood has a tendency to transcend its surroundings... 

...but then there's the time jump. The final verse and chorus are from the perspective of Takashi the young adult, drummer of Happy End. The chimneys belching out fire and smoke are Ohtaki and Hosono, who would fight all the time. From where Matsumoto sat at his drum kit, he'd see one friend and bandmate standing to the left of him, and another standing to the right. So much, then, for childhood's harmony. Though friendship is hardly less important...

The title is a reference to the traditional children's game, hana ichi monme. The "paper play" refers to kamishibai, a form of street theater that fell out of fashion around the time Happy End were together. 



:::



We run full speed along the tramway tracks.
Whirlwinds form.
The streets are quaking.

The petals of the flowers flutter
when the painted wind goes by.
The streets that shimmer in the summer heat
look just like fields of flowers.

When the paper play narrator
folds up his corner stand,
the narrow back alleys
overflow with heroes.

To the kids of the dusty wind,
even the seven seas
look just like a miniature box garden.

The chimney on the right
spews out out yellow smoke clouds.
The chimney on the left
spews out red smoke clouds.

It's strange how quickly everyone gets so angry.
It's strange...

Translation: The Wind is Rising (Seiko Matsuda)

In the years after Happy End, Takashi Matsumoto became tremendously active as a lyric writer for younger "idol" singers, and hit an especially hot streak in the 1980s. I read somewhere that Seiko Matsuda had twenty-one consecutive number one hits, and that Matsumoto wrote the words to seventeen of them. Hosono, Ohtaki, and Suzuki all wrote music for Matsumoto-penned Matsuda songs (as did lots of (other) industry figures I know nothing about). There are several Matsuda albums that have no lyricist but Matsumoto. It sounds like a gold mine.

Granted, by the 1980s he seems to have simplified things. Hosono noted that, while it was difficult to set music to the might-as-well-be-poems Matsumoto was writing in the Happy End days, by the time they were regularly writing together for Seiko Matsuda, the words (which, in Hosono/Matsumoto co-writes, always came first) wrapped chords and melodies around themselves as easily as someone slipping into their favorite autumn coat. Matsumoto had learned what it meant to write a chart-topping pop song. That's not to say he wasn't writing other, more literary or pointed things too — that's for me to investigate. He's written words to more than two thousand songs, after all... 

So this is The Wind is Rising, and to contemporary ears, or at least to mine, everything about the song shouts "old chestnut." Or, well no... everything about the arrangement... but to some extent the tune as well. The words less so, but they too have a grandiosity of perspective and the kind of unabashed sentimentality that remind me of some old Polish and Ukrainian folk songs. In any case, they're a long way away from the miniatures of mood and setting that I know from Happy End. 

But there are still beautiful moments. For instance, in Japanese, "I want to return and I cannot return" is just two words, 帰りたい 帰れない, each four syllables long (as sung), with the first two syllables identical, the third sharing a consonant but diverging on the vowel ("ri" vs, "re"), and the fourth syllable rhyming ("tai," "nai"). The English allows for similar parallelism but isn't as compact. The compactness of the Japanese is perfect for how intense and basic the emotions are. 

The third verse ("I have to keep...") is wonderful too — so disarmingly direct — although I think other translations have preserved that sense better than mine. You can find several (!) other English translations if you dig around. Those tend toward the literal. To justify this new one, I decided I'd try to get the English as conversational and transparent as I could. Matsumoto's original is terser, and — particularly in the first verse, and in the image that always closes the chorus, 心の旅人 — more open to interpretation. You can think of my version as one such permissible interpretation. 

Another one comes up in the YouTube comment section, where several posters whose parents died when they were young discuss how forcefully this song speaks to them.

The tune is Eiichi Ohtaki's (you'll recognize his syrupy style if you followed up with How Nice the Weather Is), so this is one of those "Happy End in the '80s?" songs I mentioned yesterday. The falling melody on the words "autumn is here / 今は秋" is gorgeous. The arrangement is serious overkill, but today I listened to many stripped-down covers and none had the same power. So say what you will, the song does what it does the way it should. And the more I replay it the more I like it as is. 

Lovers of Ohtaki's "city pop king crooner" period (A Long Vacation, etc.) may refer also to this Matsuda/Ohtaki duet version.

:::

The wind is rising. Autumn is here.

Beginning today, I'll be a wanderer

along the pathways of the heart.

I didn't let you see me crying.

With the wind as my ink, I wrote a letter

on the violets, the sunflowers, and the freesias

swaying on the highland terrace —

"Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye."

Now if I turn around

I'll see the grassland changing colors.

I know, I can go on living by myself.

There's still a red bandana wound around my neck.

You'd given it to me, saying, "Hey, don't cry!"

So goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

The wind is rising. Autumn is here.

I want to return and I cannot return to your arms.

The wind is rising. Autumn is here.

Beginning today, I'll be a wanderer

along the pathways of the heart.

I have to keep my outlook bright

like the violets, the sunflowers, and the freesias.

I can't be weighted down with sorrow.

For isn't parting just a new point of departure?

Now it's goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

I plant kisses on the blades of grass.

I want to forget and I cannot forget your smile,

and when I cannot forget, I have to cast my eyes down.

The road from summer to fall is such a strange one.

The wind is rising. Autumn is here.

I want to return and I cannot return to your arms.

The wind is rising. Autumn is here.

Beginning today, I'll be a wanderer

along the pathways of the heart.

Translation: Hard-Boiled Town (Tin Pan Alley)

The Freckled Girl is the slow song, and this is the fast song. Also, The Freckled Girl is serious and Hard-Boiled Town is silly. I don't mean musically — Shigeru fools you into thinking, "What, it's just sleazy funk," then gets the uppercut in with that falsetto. It's the words that are merely playful. But "merely" sounds as if I were unhappy about that. No, it puts me in mind of Card Shark on Dylan & Co.'s Lost on the River.

Arsene is, of course, the great Lupin III. Shiritori is a game known as 接龙 in China, and that seems to go nameless in the west. You know the drill: I say "Vancouver" and then you say a word (or name a city, or whatever the rules are) that begins with "r." In Japanese it's done with syllables, in Chinese with characters.



:::

You either shoot or you get shot here.

It's a hard-boiled town, you know.

The kisses are covered in thorns

and honest chests in bullet holes.

A saucy flick of the hair means yes.

The lips say no, and yet...

The cat's-eye! Beware!

The trump card is the Queen of Hearts.

Even Holmes is telling riddles,

pale with fright.

Soup races down my cold throat

like fire.

I'll repay the favor by firing my gun at you

at point-blank range.

Even Arsene stamps his feet in fury

as he plays shiritori.

Translation: The Freckled Girl (Tin Pan Alley)

So this song is from Caramel Mama, the first Tin Pan Alley album... no wait, that needs some explanation... strictly speaking the first Tin Pan Alley album was 1973's Hosono House, in that the band Haruomi Hosono put together to record his solo debut album became Caramel Mama, who became Tin Pan Alley. The group (in various configurations) went on to become the backing band for seemingly countless records by seemingly countless Japanese (and actually not just Japanese) artists throughout the 1970s. In that sense, the first Tin Pan Alley album might be something like Minako Yoshida's Tobira no Fuyu (also 1973), but then, at that point they still called themselves Caramel Mama. The point is, in 1975 the Hosono / Suzuki / Hayashi / Matsutoya foursome put out an album under their own name (Tin Pan Alley, at that point; but they called the album Caramel Mama... confused yet?), with each member taking lead on a couple songs. 

Both of Shigeru Suzuki's had lyrics by Takashi Matsumoto. They sound like nothing Shigeru did solo before or after — they're not like the Band Wagon barnstormers from earlier that year, and they're not like the following year's exotica-via-Shigeru platter Lagoon either. But they do sound like a natural extension of the Happy End sound from that band's final album. And are precious as such.

It seems that Matsumoto never really set down the torch he'd once held for Happy End. When songs he wrote lyrics for started gaining chart success toward the end of the decade, he started to collaborate with Ohtaki and Hosono more frequently again — individually, granted, but with a secret mission of seeing how things with the band might have been if they hadn't broken up back in '73. If that's all true, he must have loved how these two Shigeru co-writes on Caramel Mama came out.

There's a fast song and a slow song. The slow song is called The Freckled Girl, and lyrically it's clearly a riff on Dylan's Girl from the North Country, and as such, an excellent example of why it's awesome when an artist at the height of their powers sets out to write their own version of some elder master's song.

The closing verse dispelled my doubts about the quality of Matsumoto's work post-break-up — or rather, confirmed my suspicion that he couldn't have just suddenly started writing mediocre stuff. It is so poignant, the tone so perfectly-honed. I did what I could with the translation but preserved maybe 20% of the effect. If you treasure lyrics as an artform the way I do, learn Japanese. Takashi Matsumoto is worth it.

:::



If on a northern street

you come upon a freckled girl,

stop and greet her.

If the cold has set you shivering,

she'll probably remove her shawl

and place it around your shoulders.

I think she could warm up

a heart as hard as stone.

A long time ago some things took place,

there was somebody who made her cry...

the very wind howled, "You scum."

I think she could warm up

a heart as hard as stone.

Does she still keep her hair long? — I find myself wondering.

Just check for me, won't you?

— if you're a friend of mine.

Translation: A Sketch from the Month of Sleet (Happy End)

The lyrics of A Sketch from the Month of Sleet, the third of the Suzuki/Matsumoto tunes on the third Happy End album, are pretty abstract. I feel more confident translating when I know — or at least think I know — what's going on — what exactly the scene is, what exactly the tone is. Here the tone was not a problem. The scenes were more elusive. Especially the second verse! I love that those words and images appear where they do, but I don't know what they signify.

Perhaps the chorus says it all. There is a story too sad to tell outright (the world itself is crying over it, which is why the parasol is wet with tears — literally with rain; which is to say, the world's tears), so the verses have no option but to dress themselves in abstract, seemingly unmoored images.

But musically there's never any doubt. The sorrow in this song is a thing of grandeur, and it colors the entire rest of the album. These three or so minutes of music are one of the reasons this third Happy End record has become my third favorite "of all time."

Chu Kosaka and Tin Pan Alley's sleazy rearrangement on 1975's Horo is killer too, though. Haruomi Hosono, producer king! All bow down!

Side-note: It's been less than a week — I'm six Matsumoto translations in and sensing an obsession coming on. I've spent most of my free time today looking up interviews and getting the beginnings of a sense of what happened after Happy End. 

:::



The streets are dim and hazy
on the far side of the rain.
A red and yellow parasol
is wet with tears.

A drawing of your face was done
in twelve colors of pencil.

Hey, quit it already — that's enough, don't you think?
— of a story so desolate and lonely.

Pale streets are sinking deep into
the darkness of your eyes.

Hey, quit it already — that's enough, don't you think?
— of a story so desolate and lonely.

Translation: Tomorrow It'll Surely Be Spring (Happy End)

Shigeru Suzuki was, you could say, the George Harrison of Happy End. He was the lead guitarist, the contributor of the fewest songs and, significantly, the youngest. He was drawn into the project as a high school student, having gained a reputation as a (or the) guitar whiz in the college neighborhood in which Happy End took shape. And, like George, he never shed his identity as "the kid" (Paul McCartney said in the 2000s: "I'll always see George as a kid brother"). There's a great moment in the Kazemachi Roman documentary when, after a moving monologue from Shigeru, Hosono and Matsumoto (all three in their seventies) nod sagely and comment: "Ahh, he's grown up."

There's another story, from the L.A. sessions for the group's 1972 record. When Eiichi Ohtaki first heard the vocals in the intro to Tomorrow It'll Surely Be Spring, he was outraged: Shigeru had ripped off Burt Bacharach's Alfie! Shigeru countered that he'd never heard the song in his life. Ohtaki didn't believe him. Hosono took Shigeru's side: "Shigeru's a rock and roller, where would he have heard Alfie?" Ohtaki, still angry, insisted: "Only a genius could come up with that melody spontaneously, like Shigeru's claiming to." Implication clearly being: THE KID could not be a genius. Well, Eiichi...

To keep the George parallels going, you might say this Suzuki/Matsumoto tune feels like a variant on Here Comes the Sun. It doesn't have the weight of sorrow in it, like George's song does. But it shares the joy, the deep relief, the profound and visceral pleasure of sunshine caressing your skin at last.

So far, every Matsumoto lyric I translate leaves me in greater awe of him. I wonder how much of the sensitivity and precision these texts abound in survived his switch to lyricist-for-hire. Matsumoto has said that whenever he feels he's lost his way, he goes back and studies the lyrics he wrote for Happy End. Maybe he feels he never bettered his work with the band, or maybe it's that, when he wrote for them, his vision was at its most rooted and most essential. These thirty-some-odd songs became his compass.

But if, in his vast post-Happy End catalogue, there are more lyrics this wonderful — even if they aren't numerous — then there's no telling when, or whether, he'll stop climbing my list of favorite lyricists. For now, I get the feeling that if the three Happy End albums were all he'd done, he'd still be worthy of the adulation we lyric-minded types in the west give someone like Syd Barrett.

My favorite image this time is the candy street (砂糖菓子の街). My knowledge of Japanese is limited so there could be an implication or allusion I'm missing, but if there is, it speaks to the strength of the imagery, that it works so well sans reference. 

The line could be purely, or let's say photorealistically, descriptive. In China, I often find that (to draw an example from a recent walk) all the door shops, for example (and I mean, literally, door shops: shops that sell doors — to the delight of our two-year-old), are on the same street. If the situation in Japan is similar, then maybe what Matsumoto has in mind is a particular Tokyo street with a lot of confectioner's shops all close together, which would normally be bustling with kids and lagging parents. But I think it's the ice that prompts the image: ice-encrusted, everything — the street (any street), the shops, the fixtures — looks like glazed candy.

I didn't preserve this in the translation, but do note that in the Japanese, the two single-line choruses ("winter is travelling..." and the title line) rhyme (naru なる / haru 春). Matsumoto doesn't usually rhyme (man after my own heart!), which makes this instance striking.

Also, note the lily magnolias, which bloom in late winter.



:::



Winter's make-up, flowing white.
The candy street, all quiet.
A milk bottle on the table
with our springtime packed inside.

Come see winter cross the sky
ever so slowly, so slowly.

Winter is traveling ever further away.

In springtime's room there's flowing green,
all blossoming lily magnolias.
You and I turned into birds
to whirl where the spring is thawing.

Tomorrow it'll surely be spring.

Translation: #3 Goodbye Street (Happy End)

Haruomi Hosono formed Happy End because he wanted to be Buffalo Springfield. Every member must write! And whoever writes the song sings it! In fact, drummer Takashi Matsumoto handled the lyric-writing, while Hosono and Ohtaki handled the music, and whoever wrote the music sang. 

Halfway through the band's run, lead guitarist Shigeru Suzuki began to write his own songs. I think I remember him noting in a documentary that he was corralled into songwriting by Hosono's vision and not by any inner drive. But that's how it goes. Some people seem to be born writers (Neil Young, say, or Jason Molina) while others start with a random nudge and still end up becoming fantastic.

"His own songs," I said, but really it was "song." The band's middle record, the legendary Kazemachi Roman, had exactly one Shigeru composition. Then Ohtaki went off and made his debut solo album, which meant that, in effect, he came to the Los Angeles sessions for Happy End's third album empty. Imagine! A major member of the band having nothing to contribute! It'd be like — like Neil Young having hardly anything to do with a Buffalo Springfield record!

I adore Ohtaki (and that solo album rules) but I wouldn't want Happy End's third to have come into being any other way. If Ohtaki hadn't made the solo album, and if he'd come to Los Angeles with all those wonderful Matsumoto co-writes in tow, we'd have had another profound Hosono/Ohtaki/Matsumoto masterpiece, yes. But what we got instead was better, or at least, far less likely: a profound masterpiece of Hosono/Suzuki/Matsumoto provenance. Somebody had to fill in for Ohtaki. Shigeru stepped up.

His songwriting arc after flowering on this 1972 album was curious. Permit me to gloss it. 

When Happy End broke up, Shigeru joined Haruomi Hosono for the Tin Pan Alley venture (1973-1978) as lead guitarist / all-around stringed-instrument maestro (banjo, mandolin, etc.), but — disappointed by the oddball exotica direction the leader's albums took after 1973's Hosono House — he returned to L.A. in 1975 to record his own solo debut, Band Wagon. Backed by members of Little Feat, he made an album so heavy on the rock and funk that it can be a trudge to hear in full. There are no quieter moments in which you can catch your breath. But the songs, taken individually, are as brilliant as the three '72 Happy End compositions would lead you to hope.

The hard rock out of his system, Shigeru made an exotica album after all, with Hosono producing: 1976's drifty, mystical Lagoon. He did a fair amount of production and songwriting work for contemporaries, that being Tin Pan Alley's modus operandi. And then, eschewing both rock and Hawaiian mysticism, he transformed himself into the soft rocking king of my heart. The arrangements on 1977's Caution!, 1978's Telescope, and 1979's Cosmos '51 (the last of which has, get this, Sakamoto keys and Takahashi drums) are not the kind of thing I would have imagined accompanying music I go apeshit for. Yet here we are.

In 1978, he contributed three instrumental songs to cult classic Pacific. His second album of 1979 (White Heat — again with Sakamoto and Takahashi, as well as former Tin Pan Alley bandmate Akiko Yano) was all-instrumental and brought his electric guitar back into focus. In 1985 came an album I haven't heard yet. Various collaborations followed over the decades but few songs. 

And that seems to have been about it as far as Shigeru the songwriter goes. But isn't that plenty? A decade stuffed full of incredible work? And with the lyrics to nearly all his songs penned by Takashi Matsumoto?!

Because that's the other thing to remember. Hosono started writing his own lyrics as early as this Happy End album (though he and Matsumoto collaborated on lots of hits for others, including this one for Yellow Magic Orchestra). Ohtaki made a habit of writing on his own too, before renewing his collaboration with Matsumoto in the '80s, for the revered city pop touchstone A Long Vacation and its sequel, Each Time. But Shigeru was the guy Matsumoto seemed particularly devoted to. I haven't dug deep enough into Japanese sources to figure out why, but even on this 1972 Happy End album, it's not that Matsumoto couldn't have written new lyrics for Hosono and Ohtaki, it's that he chose not to. "This time, only for Shigeru-kun."

And so we have #3 Goodbye Street, one of three Suzuki/Matsumoto songs on the album. They are all three magnificent, by my lights. The horn lines at the end are probably Van Dyke Parks, but the slink and groove and sassy attitude are obviously all Shigeru. The contrast with the lyrics is so stark I wonder which came first. Way to adorn a relationship's deathly lull!



:::



Strange and unknown skies revolve around me.
The paint flows, lonely, off of winter's brush.

Words as bitter as "goodbye"
have occupied each street in town.

I'm waiting for you to remember
that you're capable of smiling.

Translation: Country Road (Happy End)

The second self-titled Happy End album's other Eiichi Ohtaki song is a burst of joy and energy in direct contrast with How Nice the Weather Is, which follows it. Musically, Country Road is mid-'60s rock and roll speared through with the brightness of 1972 Japan: in the hands of all those tremendous Japanese artists, western music influences came out transformed, usually for the better.

There's a wonderful Shigeru Suzuki solo in the middle, and another at the end. Each is answered by a weird Ohtaki riff. I love the piano. But as in the next song, it's Ohtaki's singing that elevates this from "pleasant filler" to "wait, what! this is great!"

My favorite lyrical detail is the last line in the last verse: a sign of how fierce the country sunshine is. When the narrator lies down in the field and looks upward to where his lover is standing, he can see the sunlight through the skin of her earlobes.



:::



The heavens are the color of marmalade.
I'm laughing, out of breath,
throwing my straw hat to the wind.

I want to run down it!
This country road!

You are so cute and oh so moody.
Come have a swim inside the light!
Frown if you will, but laugh as well.

I want to run down it!
This country road!

The sunflowers burn brightly
in gardens spread under thatched roofs.
The proprietress greets us, smiling.

I want to run down it!
This country road!

The sun descends on us like rain.
I lie down in a rapeseed field
and now your earlobes look transparent.

I want to run down it!
This country road!

Translation: How Nice the Weather Is (Happy End)

In 1972, after completing Kazemachi Roman with the band, Eiichi Ohtaki made a solo album that was half a Happy End album in its own right, considering the line-up — but the tunes were all his. Not long after, the band hightailed it to Los Angeles, seeking Van Dyke Parks, to record Happy End's second self-titled. Ohtaki didn't have much left to offer.

He did beautiful lead vocals on the chorus of one of Shigeru Suzuki's songs, but otherwise laid low, tucking his two modest new tracks onto the end of Side B. Takashi Matsumoto was only composing new lyrics for Shigeru by then, so How Nice the Weather Is drew on a collection of Matsumoto poems. The wistful words give Ohtaki's fluffy genre exercise metaphysical weight. Ohtaki, for his part, and as ever, nails the vocal delivery.



:::



You sit by yourself at the window
that the pale blue light shines through.
The wind would make your visage spread
like colors spread in water.

At the table wet with pale blue light
you are sitting, chin in hand,
and trying to remember
the remainder of the morning's dream.

Come on! Put on your hat and go outside.
Look how nice the weather is.

It's much too sad to stay indoors here
where the pale blue light brims over.
The wind would make your dreaming spread
like colors spread in water.