Translation: Well, You Know, It's Summer (Happy End)

Hosono has said that his main influence at the time Happy End was making Kazemachi Roman was James Taylor. Hosono had hated recording lead vocals on the songs he'd written for their debut. But he loved the Buffalo Springfield ideal of multiple singers and songwriters too much not to keep trying. Then he discovered James Taylor and, specifically, the Sweet Baby James record, and found the vocals revelatory. "Oh, so when you have a voice as low as mine, you can do things this way." 

Under the James Taylor influence, Haruomi's gentle new songs arrived. Gathering the Wind was one of them; Well, You Know, It's Summer another. A couple years later, Hosono's first solo album, Hosono House, was a deliberate stab at making his own One Man Dog.

Well, You Know, It's Summer is the first track on Side B, and it starts quietly, with acoustic guitars — totally unlike I Want to Hold You Close back on Side A. I think it has the album's most subtle and ethereal arrangement. The verse that the drums drop out for...! and the way the drums come back in!! Matsumoto says it's because he wrote the band's lyrics that his drumming style became (not his words, he's always been modest) so uniquely soulful. He wanted the drums to help carry the emotions.

When I hear this song now, I think: "Little wonder that Hosono later spent over a decade just playing cover songs." He's a magnificent interpreter. Listening to him sing, who'd believe he hadn't written the words himself?

Takashi's lyrics need no annotations, but I'll add a little about their personal resonance.

I was raised on anime — classic fantasy anime for the most part, Fushigi Yuugi, the Slayers, Record of Lodoss War, Hayao Miyazaki's films; but also plenty of sci-fi, where the setting is often more-or-less present-day Japan, at least to start with; as well as a healthy dose of "dimension travel" and "girl with secret magical powers, but she's in high school" types of shows. In Japan, school starts up again in midsummer, and whenever one of these shows set in middle-high wanted to indicate that it was summertime, they'd pan the school building from the outside, so that you could see the bright green trees sweltering in the summer haze, and as the camera lingered on the school building, you'd hear the noise of the cicadas, maybe as a backdrop to the ringing of the recess bell.

That roar of the cicadas made a huge impression on me. So imagine the surreal delight I felt when, newlywed, my wife and I moved to the south of China, and heard that same midsummer roar of cicadas daily. And not just daily — yearly. They're singing in glorious chorus outside my window as I write. When you walk under certain trees you can't hear yourself think. 

You don't often meet songs that hold your childhood and present life in the same embrace.



:::



In the country,
on the white footpaths
between rice fields,

the dusty wind has stopped blowing.

A few boys have crouched down 

on the bare earth

and are flicking marbles around.

That all-pervading blinding light...

well, you know. That's how the sun is.

That all-pervading blinding light...

well, you know, it's summer.

A hush has fallen

over the deep green

of the trees by the village shrine.

A certain someone's likeness

dangles from the storefront

of the old teahouse.

Hwooooosh, ggadzha ggadzha...

the cicadas' song.

Hwooooosh, ggadzha ggadzha...

well, you know, it's summer.

I'm twirling a parasol.

I'm bored.

I'm twirling a parasol.

I'm bored.

I keep an eye

on the embroidered sky

as I run up the cobbled path.

When summer comes,

it always comes with rain.

Towering, lumping puffily together...

those cumulonimbus clouds.

Towering, lumping puffily together...

well, you know, it's summer.

I'm twirling a parasol.

I'm bored.

I'm twirling a parasol.

I'm bored.

                       

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