Translation: Downpour City (Happy End)

When Haruomi Hosono was working on his first solo album, he asked Takashi for a new set of lyrics. Takashi obliged. Hosono set Takashi's words to music and performed the song live. But when Hosono House came out, the song wasn't on the tracklist. "Ah," thought the crestfallen lyricist, "I guess he didn't like it enough."

Forty years later, someone digging through Hosono's vaults unearthed the original 1973 demo. Hosono decided to rewrite the song and put it on a tribute album celebrating Takashi's 45th anniversary as a songwriter. But he thought, "Well, it's really got a Happy End flavor to it..." and invited Shigeru Suzuki to come play the guitars, and also commanded Takashi to do the drums. 

Thus the surviving members of Happy End (Eiichi Ohtaki had died the year before) recorded Downpour City. They were eager to release it under the Happy End name, but some honcho in the record company balked, and it came out credited to Hosono alone.

The melody on the lines "the city's a downpour / the roads are rivers" (街は驟雨 通りは川) is the same as it was in 1973. The rest of the song is newly-written, and has that simultaneously genial and melancholic flavor that most late Hosono originals share.

Haruomi, Shigeru, and Takashi sound so good playing together as old men, that I've found myself wondering — how much of the world's best music would they and Eiichi have made, if the band had stayed together? Although if they did, there would probably have been no Yellow Magic Orchestra, no Monad albums...

:::



The lightning flash was like a strobe light

or an optical illusion:

a white face in the dark.

I bit back the words I was about to say.

You watched the dark clouds rush past.

The city's a downpour.

The roads are rivers.

In the night sky are bright threads

winding around a Ferris wheel.

The city's a downpour.

The roads are rivers.

Our everyday lives are

a broken magic lantern.

To exist means drinking drops

of the poison we call loneliness.

What's the distance from here to happiness?

How many centimeters left, exactly?

Shall we grab a ruler and find out?

The city's a downpour.

The roads are rivers.

Grating and creaking

are the sounds our hearts make.

The city's a downpour.

The roads are rivers.

Serrated, torn-off edges

at the borders of the world.

(Back to: List of Translations)