Translation: Memories in Summer Colors (Tulip)

So it turns out that Kazuo Zaitsu, who did the music for White Parasol, also wrote Memories in Summer Colors, the song that broke Takashi into the pop charts, eight months after the final Happy End album came out, and just two weeks after Happy End's final concert.

Fatefully, this song brought Takashi to the attention of Kyohei Tsutsumi, an established composer who became Takashi's biggest fan and most steadfast collaborator. Together they wrote around four hundred songs.

I'm partial to this 2021 cover by Kiyoe Yoshiyoka, recorded for the 50th anniversary Matsumoto tribute album, Take Me to Kazemachi. Yoshiyoka's version tones down the Beatlesy kitsch in Tulip's arrangement (turns out the song was actually a tribute to Badfinger... secondhand Beatles, then!), while transforming the song into a would-be anime OP (listen to 0:22 - 0:42 and tell me you can't see the stylized title hang in place as the scenery speeds by behind it). It's fun to discover a connection between my current musical obsession and all the L'arc~en~Ciel / Porno Graffitti / Asian Kung-Fu Generation / Flow etc. anime opening songs I played into the ground in my high school years.

As with White Parasol, I'm not particularly struck by the song's musical qualities, but — also like White Parasol — or actually, thanks to the Kiyoe Yoshiyoka cover, it's even more true here — repeat listens have endeared it to me.

Memories in Summer Colors is the earliest example I've found of the (apparently hit-producing) formula that seems to characterize Takashi's work after Happy End, the formula being that a character at a very particular stage in a relationship comments on how things are going, usually with reference to the setting (not in this case) or the weather (not in this case) or the season (yes, absolutely, and crucially!). Sky-Colored Crayon and #3 Goodbye Street might be considered prototypes.

Takashi's work for Happy End is poetic... incisive... loaded with attitude... personal... funny... surprising... urgent... sometimes sublime... often moving. When he shifted to work for the pop charts (in the purest form of "selling out" possible; his first child had just been born, and when he figured out that he couldn't make a living as a producer, he thought becoming a full-time commercial lyricist might keep food on the table), he left that stylish, emotional, poetic approach to lyrics behind him. But he still went on bringing himself: his idiosyncratic eye for detail, his fondness for season and scenery, and his interest not in the moments of high drama (the flaring of newborn love, or the deep misery of a break-up) but the spaces in a relationship where things are undecided, maybe shifting one way or another — like the speaker in White Parasol trying to get the boy she's interested in to give more of himself away, or the one in Rainy Resort realizing that, although neither party has admitted it yet, the relationship is over, or even The Wind is Rising, a break-up song in which the speaker has lived long enough with her break-up to know that she can, and wants to, leave despair behind.

It's not a bad formula. It's not Happy End* , okay, but it's interesting. I've yet to translate a Takashi song and think, "Ugh, that wasn't worth the effort," just like I've yet to delve into a set of Takashi lyrics and not come away with increased appreciation for the song they feature in.

The coolest thing about the Memories in Summer Colors lyrics is that they're undermined by their title — and by nothing but their title. The character is so certain that his and his girlfriend's love can survive the end of summer break. He's eager to assure her of it, and everything in his tone says he believes he can. He can see her drifting into worry and uncertainty, but he insists: never mind all that, we'll be just fine. And the bright music lends him its support.

But evidently they won't, else this song wouldn't be called Memories, would it?

*So far I've only found two post-Happy End songs in which Takashi is firing on all cylinders: The Freckled Girl and December Morning — but the day after I originally wrote this note, I found a third, Rainy Station. That's what makes this project so thrilling! Who knows where the next wild Matsumoto masterpiece might be hiding? And how many there actually are? In a catalog of 2300 songs, there could be hundreds. [Edit, six weeks on: yeah, already found plenty more.]



:::



I want to become the wind

that comes and carries you away.

I want to become the wind!

And come and carry you away!

When I look into your eyes,

it's the sea that I think of.

The pale blue-green dissolves in a way that,

for some reason, makes me sad.

Like a crane coming to rest,

summer folded its wings

before you or I had the chance to notice, but

you should know that I won't let anybody

snatch away the love we have.

I want to become the wind

that comes and carries you away.

I want to become the wind!

And come and carry you away!

I can see the blue-green sea

beyond your eyes.

The transparent waves

are overflowing, spilling over.

Hey — are you crying?

That's strange, you never cry.

Don't you know I won't let anybody

stand between us?

I want to become the wind

that comes and carries you away.

I want to become the wind!

And come and carry you away!

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