Translation: A Sky You Can't Fly In (Happy End)

"Angsty" is not a word I would have used to describe Haruomi Hosono, especially not in the Happy End period (have you seen photos of him with the band?). But as I work on these lyrics, I'm discovering that Yudemen is all about the angst. (The members were only just past twenty, after all... Shigeru was still nineteen actually, and he was the cheeriest of the bunch.)

Both of Yudemen's non-Takashi songs are deeply unhappy. Takashi wasn't necessarily feeling cheerful either, considering that he dedicated the Side A closer to Thanatos. But the two songs his bandmates supplied — It's Infuriating by Ohtaki and A Sky You Can't Fly In by Hosono — are straightforwardly, and seemingly autobiographically, miserable.

While Ohtaki seems weighed down with personal sorrows, for Hosono, it's his mission (or capabilities) as a musician that are at stake.

But that's not an insight I can take credit for. Everything after the second verse had me so stumped that I went searching through the Japanese Internet to see what Happy End heads over there made of it. I came upon a conversation between two music scholars (Japan loves publishing this sort of interview, and it's amazing; why hasn't the west caught on?) who pointed out the aggression of the lyrics (audible in the great slowburn psych-freakout music) and the depth of the speaker's bad mood. They go on to agree that the song is about Hosono feeling frustrated with Japan's music scene (this was just after the short-lived Apryl Fool experiment, remember), as contrasted with the kinds of things that were coming out of the States (see Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape). 

To be fair, I could tell that much from the first verse. What didn't occur to me is that the painter of the shoddy sky might not be Hosono's homeland or fellow Japanese artists, but Hosono himself, blown away by Takashi's lyricism and furious that he couldn't do right by it (unlike Ohtaki, who even on Yudemen so clearly could). In that case, the "poem" waiting to be born is Takashi's artistic vision, and the "experiment" Hosono's own! So even as Hosono bemoans his inability to give Takashi's words the right setting (calling himself the murderer of somebody else's newborn child!), he's taking inspiration from his bandmate, and thinking: "Maybe I'm just not being as singleminded as I should be." Or as Czesław Mozil sang in Caesia & Ruben: "If you think it's tough, you don't want it enough."

Hosono was, of course, being too hard on himself, but young songwriters have that prerogative.

Alternatively (and for me, less convincingly) the con artist in the closing segment is Japan, butchering the beautiful rock and roll music that was arriving newborn and glorious from the west, in the sense that Japanese artists were only mimicking their inspirations (and singing in English, ha!) instead of making something heartfelt, true, and new in its own right.

:::

What can happen

under a sky

so distant from America's?

What can happen

inside a heart

that's like a country

closed to entry?

It feels like this shoddy sky

was drawn by a con artist

passing himself off as a real artist.

If you have one single wish,

that wish can grow wings,

whether it's the birth of a poem you dream of

or the birth of an experiment.

Who would rejoice

if a con artist

passing herself off as a mother

killed a newborn baby?

— 'cause that's what this feels like, you know.

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