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. Haruomi Hosono, producer king! All bow down! [Edit, one year later: in fact, the Horo version is maybe one of the best rock and roll songs ever recorded?]
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.
Edit, one year later:
After hearing this album another sixty-something times, I think I get it.
Matsumoto's inspiration for A Sketch from the Month of Sleet seems to have been the album sessions themselves (just like Hosono's for No Wind).
I'll explain. Matsumoto was mortified that Hosono and Ohtaki decided to break up Happy End; and he felt deeply offended when they fell for the record label's scheme to get them to record another album (by dangling the subsidized Los Angeles trip in the band's faces). Matsumoto figured that, since they'd already murdered the band, there was no use kicking the corpse. Hence his insistence that he would play drums, but not compose lyrics (an insistence that softened only for Shigeru Suzuki's sake: Ohtaki and Hosono had experience as lyricists in their own right by that point, but Suzuki didn't, and also Suzuki, like Matsumoto, wasn't happy about the band's break-up).
Look at the chorus again. Makes sense now, doesn't it?
Ironically, and painfully, this American venture ended up, if not fun, then at least, ultimately and undeniably, a tremendous success for everyone involved, except Matsumoto. The label got their Happy End album. Shigeru Suzuki established the connections and confidence he later called on when he returned to Los Angeles alone to record his solo debut album Band Wagon. Hosono became a fan of, and friends with, Van Dyke Parks. And Ohtaki bought about a million secondhand 7-inches and LPs, prompting Hosono to wonder whether Ohtaki's post-Happy End plan was to open a record store (not exactly: but he did found a label, Niagara). It was really only Matsumoto who gained nothing from the trip, except perhaps a disdain for what he saw as the small-mindedness of the American musicians who contributed to the sessions, which fed into Goodbye America, Goodbye Japan (one of my favorite Matsumoto songs ever... so I take it back, the trip was worth it for this song alone; but Matsumoto may not have seen it that way) and probably also his later epic commitment to the music scene back home.
:::
The streets are dim and hazy
on the far side of the rain.
A red and yellow parasol
is wet with tears.
Your face was drawn
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.
Hey, quit it already — that's enough, don't you think?
— of a story so desolate and lonely.
(Back to: List of Translations)
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