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 of them 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, all he ever listens to is Jimi Hendrix. 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 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 on it, like George's song does, but it shares the joy, the relief, the 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 twenty-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 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 — look 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.

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