No Wind, beautifully sequenced as the closer of Side A, is one of Hosono's. The lyrics hardly require translation. All you need to know is that it's the tale of a sea voyage, and maybe that the song ends before anything conclusive happens — rather, at least in one sense, things are just beginning — the main character has reached his destination, and is just stepping ashore...
That's all you need to know, because the thickly atmospheric music — the arrangement, Shigeru Suzuki's electric guitar (listen to this track and tell me he isn't one of the most wonderful guitarists ever?!), the emotion in Hosono's voice, the beautiful melodies — tells you the rest. Hosono is an absolute master of atmosphere. He can conjure imagery and mood like no one else. Later he would subsume this talent of his into instrumental music, but at this point it was still tied up with his interest in formal songwriting. And so we get incomparable songs like this one.
I'm also taking the emphasis off the lyrics because they're really opaque. The song is an allegory for the band's trip to Los Angeles — the trip that resulted in the very album No Wind appears on — but it may also be an account of the band's entire three-year journey, from their auspicious and joyful beginnings ("the wind fills the mainsail!") to the awkward and uncertain, and far from happy, end. By the time these sessions came around, the band had already agreed to break up. They hadn't even meant to make another album, but someone in management booked the sessions, and so everybody went. A lot of writing had to be done on the spot.
Hosono, characteristically resourceful, took all the confusion and used it as material for a song. But things got even more confusing from there, with Eiichi Ohtaki feeling deeply hurt by the Ahab reference, thinking Hosono was describing (and insulting) him. When Ohtaki told Hosono about this (much later), Hosono was surprised, and told him, "No, you got it wrong." He'd written the line with himself in mind.
The verse about the parrot was apparently inspired by something Takashi wrote or said (the liner notes say: words & music by Haruomi Hosono, inspiration by Takashi Matsumoto), but decades passed before someone in the press thought to ask Hosono exactly what the inspiration had been, and by then Hosono — like the sailor in his song — had forgotten. "I guess it wasn't that important," Haruomi laughed.
So these are the kinds of lyrics that, though they probably had very specific referents, point to the kinds of things that only the band would have understood, and only back when the events were still fresh in everyone's minds. Years later, what we're left with is the image of the voyage, and the cloud of doom — or helplessness (I love the words addressed to the captain; note how they're sung both before and after an instrumental break, thus driving home their own point: time may pass but the ship isn't moving) — and, in the final lines, mystery — that overtakes it.
:::
The wind fills the mainsail
and we take to the sea.
We travel west
with a cargo of low-hanging clouds.
We pull light aboard as it leaks
from cracks in a broken sky.
We travel to the seas of cities
with a cargo of nuts and soil.
The parrot on my shoulder
is singing...
I can't remember what song that is.
It has the feel of some old poem.
That man is making as if he were Ahab
and could cross the sea with one stroke of the oars.
The gulls above the open sea
sing of the tide as they fly.
What does the distant sea
have on its mind?
I want to shout out the command,
"Hard aport!"
"And if there's no wind, captain? Then what?"
"And if there's no wind, captain? Then what?"
"And if there's no wind, captain? Then what?"
"And if there's no wind, captain? Then what?"
Now fold the wind that filled the mainsail.
He's disembarking
in the night fog of the harbor
of Meriken.
(Back to: List of Translations)
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