Translation: It's Springtime, Mon Amour (Miki Fujimura)

Hosono had a strange 1983 even by his own standards. Naughty Boys is beautiful and bizarre enough all by itself, but then there's the miraculous stars-align birth of Miharuomi (and Tutu rules, big-time) and also all these odd side-jobs, like Side A of Miki Fujimura's solo album (four out of the five Side A songs have music by Hosono, two with Takashi Matsumoto lyrics; the non-Hosono song has an amazing Yukihiro Takahashi arrangement, radio-friendly pop music via paranoid BGM downer vibes), alongside a late and unexpected encore to the Tropical Trilogy on a couple of tracks Hosono wrote for Harumi Ohzora. There was also the massive Yellow Magic Orchestra farewell tour. And the album Service. And Hosono getting the commission for, and recording, Watering a Flower. And producing Inoyama Land's debut.

Hosono, then, was in peak form. But I'm starting to worry about Takashi. It's Springtime, Mon Amour (Hosono/Matsumoto) is the second 1983-vintage Takashi lyric I've translated, and it probably ties with the first (My Heart Goes "Kyun" for You) for the title of least impressive Takashi lyric I've worked on. Either I'm just having awful luck, or 1983 was a low point — one of those nadir periods when Takashi lost his compass and needed to revisit his Happy End-era work to reorient. I suspect it's just my bad luck (Takashi probably wrote, what, 200 songs in '83?) but, being a pessimist, I'm worried that it's the latter.

It's weird to think that Hosono/Matsumoto songs always began with the lyrics. That means Takashi wrote these words, and delivered them to Haruomi, and that Haruomi read them, and then set them to music so beautiful, it would make you think Miki Fujimura was revealing mystical secrets about the origins and ultimate purpose of the cosmos.

:::

If I saw you by chance

on the corner of the street,

I wouldn't say anything.

I would polish my hand-mirror

and signal you 

with a gleam of light.

Someone as dazzling as you

would undoubtedly notice.

"You're beautiful."

— but you can't let your guard down

around a voice that sounds kind.

If you make to grab hold of its owner,

they'll just slip cleverly away.

I know that lost time

can't be called back again.

But my heart has turned the color of adventure.

You're dangerous, my darling.

Even if you take me out on a date,

I'll keep looking at my watch

as if I have some other appointment.

I'll aggravate you on purpose.

I got jilted once, a long time ago,

so I've learned to keep a certain distance.

This whole time I've been so eager to see you, though.

But I'll be keeping that a secret.

Now I'm getting this strange feeling

that spring is almost here.

I'm dangerous, my darling.

My heart has turned the color of adventure.

You're dangerous, my darling.

Dangerous, my darling.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Hurricane Dorothy (Haruomi Hosono)

Revising my old translations of the Dandy. Here's Hurricane Dorothy, yet another perfect Hosono song.

Speaking of great Shigeru Suzuki solos — his skillset as a lead guitarist was of little use on the Tropical Trilogy, but even so, here and there, he made a mark.



:::



Your eyes are like the Caribbean wind,

your gaze loaded with heat,

blowing through the white bowers.

Ah, and those lips are like Arabian darkness —

murmuring in a secret language

words sounding like abra cadabra.

The waves are getting taller.

I've lost, Dorothy,

I'm at your mercy

as the storm rages,

dancing the bolero,

dancing the bolero.

The waves are getting taller.

I've lost, Dorothy,

I'm at your mercy

as the storm rages,

dancing the bolero,

dancing the bolero.

The last remaining shadows

are like a song from Slavic lands.

The colors of summer are about to vanish.

As, for that matter, am I.

See? Abra cadabra.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Festival of Mud (Chu Kosaka)

It's insane how good this Hosono song, Festival of Mud, is... and maybe it's not even my favorite on Arigatou? That could be the title track, or Spring is Here, or Evening Firefly, or Wayside Grass. 

But maybe also Festival of Mud.

I think this is Hosono's take on the same theme as Kosaka's Locomotive. If so, then these guys were either really lucky, or one or both of them put some serious thought into the sequencing. Festival of Mud and The Locomotive, these sister songs, are the second and second-to-last songs on Side A. Spring is Here and Country Roads, sister songs themselves, are the first and last songs on Side B. In both cases, it's Hosono's first, and Kosaka's later.

This song was left off of the Chu's Garden box set of re-releases because the word for "deaf" has turned derogatory over the years. The most recent re-release, from last year, reinstated Festival of Mud onto Arigatou and printed an apology/explanation on the back cover.

One of the great projects I have ahead of me is figuring out what recordings have my favorite Shigeru Suzuki guitar work on them (I haven't dug very deep, he played on tons of stuff in the years before he went soft rock). He's my favorite guitarist. For the time being, Festival of Mud is way up there. His tone is fantastic, and mixed so beautifully. It sounds like Hosono had been listening to Jethro Tull's Aqualung record (compare Mother Goose) but I don't know if he had been, he'd need to have gotten hold of a copy right away. Maybe he'd been listening to Benefit instead. Or maybe it's just further evidence of Hosono's genius — maybe Hosono/Suzuki and Anderson/Barre got to the same sound at (more or less) the same time, independently of each other.

In the line about mushrooms, the word for "sprouting all over," shigeru, is Shigeru Suzuki's given name — the kanji is the same too (茂る). I don't know if Hosono realized why that particular verb popped into his head back when he was still working on the words, but by the time Kosaka was recording the album, he definitely had, because the moment Kosaka sings the word "shigeru," Shigeru's electric guitar answers with a gnarly riff, as if his name had been a cue.

The one-note solo at the end is as wonderful as Neil Young's in Cinnamon Girl and Vampire Blues.

:::

Stylish Shinto palanquins.

A festival band playing.

Let yourself get carried away,

you'll see flowers blooming everywhere.

Stylish Shinto palanquins.

A festival band playing.

Let yourself get carried away,

you'll see flowers blooming everywhere.

The dull light of the sunset.

The festival of evening.

My hands over my ears. Just passing by.

Torrential rain is visiting

a village wracked by drought.

Let yourself get carried away,

you'll see mushrooms sprouting all over.

Torrential rain is visiting

a village wracked by drought.

Let yourself get carried away,

you'll see mushrooms sprouting all over.

Nothing but sludge, thick and viscous.

The festival of mud.

My hands over my ears. Just passing by.

The festival! The festival!

Buddha's birthday festival!

The bonfire! The bonfire!

The cascade of fallen leaves!

And one deaf person 

remaining deaf to it all.

Stylish Shinto palanquins.

A festival band playing.

Let yourself get carried away,

you'll see flowers blooming everywhere.

Stylish Shinto palanquins.

A festival band playing.

Let yourself get carried away,

you'll see flowers blooming everywhere.

The dull light of the sunset.

The festival of evening.

My hands over my ears. Just passing by.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Spring is Here (Chu Kosaka)

Say what you might about the lack of verisimilitude in Country Roads, you can't fault Kosaka and Hosono for not being playful or imaginative enough. Hosono, a Tokyo native just like Kosaka, contributed his own "country boy who moved to the city misses the countryside" song to Arigatou. Spring is Here, Hosono's take, opens Side B, and Country Roads, Kosaka's take, closes it, which makes me think they knew what they were after.

As you'd expect of someone whose other contributions to the album were Festival of Mud and Thank You, this is one gorgeous song. The chorus sounds odd but the lyrics ground it. 

On the album tracklist, it's an unassuming prelude to Evening Firefly, the album's long and jammy centerpiece. But lately I've found it nice to put Spring is Here on repeat and play it for an hour or two at a time. It's really soothing.

Come to think of it, this song's gently meditative spirit might make it the earliest stirring of the Hosono who would later bring us Watering a Flower, Mercuric Dance, and Medicine Compilation from the Quiet Lodge.



:::

Spring is here.

But where is "here" ?

Coming over the mountains

and down through the valleys.

In my old home village.

In the mountains of my home.

In the countryside

I've dreamed about —

the countryside I dream about

no matter how much time goes by.

I'm facing the window

and humming a song.

Yupita iyaio ~

(One year has passed.)

Yupita iyaio ~

(On into the second year.)

Yupita iyaio ~

(Now it's been three years.)

Yupita iyaio ~

(Through the fourth year too.)

[ repeat all of the above, then — ]

The countryside keeps moving

further and further away,

further and further away.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Locomotive (Chu Kosaka)

The Locomotive first appeared on Side A of Arigatou as a country/folk-rock song with Hosono playing the mandolin. On that initial version, each stanza was sung to the same melody, with the chorus signalled by harmonies. (The whole album has great fucking harmonies.)

A few years later, Kosaka slowed the tempo way down and rewrote the chorus melody into something Jerry Garcia or Robbie Robertson might have come up with. This new country-soul arrangement came out on 1975's Horo.

The lyrics, written in 1971, are about the generation Kosaka went to university with in the late '60s. Being a solitary artist type, distrustful of movements, he kept his distance from the radical student protests of 1968 and 1969 — then watched as the classmates who'd poured their hearts into the protests and reforms entered the workforce and got subsumed into the machine they'd fought.

:::

Anyway, nothing has been left behind.

The locomotive rushes forward.

As you continue treading on my shadow,

the locomotive rushes forward,

ever forward.

My eyes are closed

and my ears can't hear,

and what's more,

my hands are bound together.

I've been hurrying 

so as not to miss the train

and now there's no stopping

and no getting off the tracks.

The locomotive belches out

the indigo-blue smoke of lies.

I love you, I love you.

My eyes are closed

and my ears can't hear,

and what's more,

my hands are bound together.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Wayside Grass (Chu Kosaka)

Commenting on Arigatou's songs as I post these translations has got me addicted to the album again. The more I listen to it, the more beautiful and affecting it becomes. And as if we needed more evidence that originality is overrated — Kosaka and Hosono's work on Arigatou was deeply influenced by the contemporaneous scene on America's west coast, but the albums the two of them made in the early 1970s were so much better than nearly anything I've heard coming out of the States in the same period.

Wayside Grass, which shares a title with a Natsume Soseki novel, is the gentle comedown from the Crazy Horse-esque Evening Firefly, in which the lyrics remind me of Kusamakura, another Soseki book. Kosaka must have been a fan.

This is Chu's song, not Haruomi's, but it shows how similar a wavelength they were on. The lyrics hold their own (good wandering song, great lunch box), but the best thing about the words is how they sound, not what they signify. In Japanese, the song's chorus, "far away in the mountainous country / the flowers are rapeseed and renge" (遠い山国の花は菜の花 れんげ草) is mellifluous beyond belief. The sound combinations are not very natural (poetry rarely is) and far from obvious, but they become such a pleasure to sing once you get to used to how and in what order they fall.

In late 1972 and 1973, Hosono got deep into that region of sonic/verbal play himself, but he'd already unlocked the gates here with Chu Kosaka, one year earlier. The title track, for instance, is just nuts in this regard. You don't hear that kind of thing on Kazemachi Roman (except, you see, on Ohtaki's self-penned Typhoon!) because the Hosono songs have Takashi lyrics, and Takashi, not being a singer, didn't develop that side of his songwriting until he was a hardened professional. Not needing to worry about how his words would sound when sung is partly what allowed him to write so much wonderful image- and mood-heavy stuff. (And sometimes — like in 1972's Suburban Train, by Sons of Sun — the words came out breathtakingly mellifluous anyway.)



:::



In a little village
at the foot of the mountains,
there are fields of rapeseed flowers
by where the mulberries grow.

I've walked a long way,
now I'm tired.
I'll take a break by the wayside
and unpack my lunch box.

Far away in the mountainous country,
the flowers are rapeseed and renge.
Far away in the mountainous country,
the flowers are rapeseed and renge.

In a little village
beyond the mountains,
renge is growing
in the disused fields.

I've walked a long way,
now I'm tired.
I'll take a break by the wayside
and unpack my lunch box.

Far away in the mountainous country,
the flowers are rapeseed and renge.
Far away in the mountainous country,
the flowers are rapeseed and renge.



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Country Roads (Chu Kosaka)

Country Roads, the last song on Arigatou.

Kosaka's words (indeed simple and straightforward, here) are pure fantasy. He was a city boy, born in Tokyo. But the simplicity and, shall I say, naivety of the lyrics belie the power of the music. All those wistful outros, man! So moving! The tune and arrangement lift the words straight up. 

The Happy End guys clearly loved the song too — Eiichi Ohtaki reworked it into Kazemachi Roman's Spring in Full Bloom, making no attempt to cover his traces.

:::

Hello, everybody.

It's been a while since I last wrote.

How've you all been? Much the same?

I'm doing alright myself.

— now I'm sending this letter back home...

It's so far away,

so impossibly far away,

and I'm feeling lonely,

so lonely.

The old country roads

of my home, sweet home,

are on my mind.

The paths between rice fields,

overgrown with horsetail stems.

The woodpeckers in the mountains,

greedy eaters.

I'm doing alright myself.

— now I'm sending this letter to all my friends back home...

It's so far away,

so impossibly far away,

and I'm feeling lonely,

so lonely.

The old country roads

of my faraway home

are on my mind.

It's so far away,

so impossibly far away,

and I'm feeling lonely,

so lonely.

The old country roads

of my home, sweet home,

are on my mind.

Hello, everybody.

It's been a while since I last wrote.

How've you all been? Much the same?

I'm doing alright myself.

— now I'm sending this letter back home...

It's so far away...

It's so far away...

It's so far away...

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Crow (Chu Kosaka)

Crow, the first song on Arigatou.

Chu Kosaka remembered that twice a year, around New Year's and again during the Obon (Tomb-Sweeping) Festival in the summertime — Obon comes up in Evening Firefly too, but from the perspective of someone traveling out in the countryside — Tokyo's human population would see a severe dip, most residents returning to their hometowns for a visit. Kosaka, for his part, was born in Tokyo, and had nowhere to go. "Only we Tokyoites stuck around. It was us and the crows."

Should you want to hear Hosono's lovely bassline loud and clear, Atom Bird Mother is here for us.



:::



A tired-out city with nobody in it.
Pulling faces in the summer heat.
Oh, don't get too angry.
There's nothing we can do about it, now is there, crow?

Faded red rooftiles.
The summer light turning its face away.
Oh, don't get too angry.
There's nothing we can do about it, now is there, crow?

You're working overtime, Mr. Crow,
pecking at the stone,
trying to hurry the autumn along.

A tired-out city with nobody in it.
Pulling faces in the summer heat.
Oh, don't get too angry.
There's nothing we can do about it, now is there, crow?



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Evening Firefly (Chu Kosaka)

Yesterday I called Chu Kosaka's lyrical style simple and straightforward, but that's wrong. Maybe the song I posted the translation for yesterday was rather simple, and I was thinking of how The Locomotive is too, but today I'm thinking that I could only call The Locomotive "simple" because Kosaka has explained what the song is about. With his explanation, it makes perfect sense. Without it, I'm sure I would've been confused.

The comparison to High Winds, White Sky (which also came out in 1971; good year for folk-rock) fares better. The original songs on Arigatou, like Evening Firefly here, tend to the impressionistic. Compare the title track on Bruce Cockburn's album, or Let Us Go Laughing. 

Kosaka takes the impressionism further than Cockburn, though. In both the chorus and the verses, grammatical links tend to be left out of the clauses, so it's just image / image / image / image. For this translation, I've tried to present the individual images in a way that helps the song segments feel like coherent wholes, but it's an interpretive act. A different reader/listener could create different coherence.

Musically, this may be the only place where you can hear Haruomi Hosono influenced by Crazy Horse. It makes sense — Hosono loved Buffalo Springfield and Neil's first solo album, so he would definitely have found his way to a copy of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. The influence didn't take root (though, god, imagine Hosono leading a Crazy Horse-esque band?), but it's clear he'd been listening. It's like Crazy Horse filtered through the blues-rock of Happy End's Yudemen.

This Kosaka song made such a deep impression on its producer that, eleven years later, Hosono turned two lines of the lyrics ("come this way, firefly" and "the water ... is so sweet") into the text of Luminescent/Hotaru.

:::

Hey! He-ey! Come this way, firefly.

The water over that way is so sweet,

in summer

at the head of the river

at sunset.

There's someone I'm pining for.

The sunset clouds are glowing.

They're performing the Bon dance in the nearby town.

I catch a glimpse from behind

of the red strap of a sandal.

    Hey! He-ey! Come this way, firefly.

    The water over that way is so sweet,

    in summer

    at the head of the river

    at sunset.

I visit the temple behind Sagayama.

I run upstairs, geta clacking.

Hey there, evening firefly,

the water here is bitter.

    Hey! He-ey! Come this way, firefly.

    The water over that way is so sweet,

    in summer

    at the head of the river

    at sunset.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Winter, Spring, Summer (Chu Kosaka)

This has been another of those periods where I've gone on translating but lacked the time to post anything. I spent the better part of a week addicted to Chu Kosaka's 1971 Arigatou album (the production credit for Mickey Curtis is a nominal one; Curtis owned the Mushroom label that put the record out, but the actual producer at the sessions was Kosaka's best friend, Haruomi Hosono) and now I'm addicted to the 1972 Sons of Sun album, Kaizoku Kid no Bouken, most of the lyrics on which are by Takashi Matsumoto, fresh off of writing Kazemachi Roman. So I've got a backlog of Kosaka and Sons of Sun translations to put up, alongside other things.

To start with, then (and I'll try to put up something new daily), here's Winter, Spring, Summer, track 3 on Side A of Arigatou, lyrics and music both by Kosaka. 

I wasn't originally planning on translating Kosaka songs, but I got curious what kind of material Hosono had deemed worthy of Horo, so I translated The Locomotive, which — like Kosaka's other originals, it turns out — is simple and straightforward, but winning. Kosaka's lyrics remind me of Graham Nash's, if considerably more affecting. Think the best of Nash — Our House, say, or the first verse of Military Madness — but with a thematic focus on nature and the outdoors, like in Bruce Cockburn's High Winds, White Sky — at least, that's what the Arigatou songs are like. 

The three Hosono originals were the only reason Arigatou was on my radar before last week, but now that I've realized Kosaka writes great songs too (the chorus on this one is killer), I'm eager to delve into 1973's Hazukashi Sou Ni. It's the only '70s Kosaka album that Hosono didn't have a hand in making; Kosaka wrote, or co-wrote, all ten tracks. Come Horo, two years later, Kosaka had shifted out of singer-songwriter mode, focusing more on singing itself. It mattered less by then whose songs they were, his own or others'. It makes Hazukashi Sou Ni an interesting outlier.

For kotatsu, see the wiki entry. For a cat inside a kotatsu, see here.

:::



The cat forms a perfect circle

inside the kotatsu.

Cold winds descend

from the winter mountains.

The school of the rice fish is

inside the stream.

The buds of the willows

sprout in the spring.

The dragonfly I kissed

flies over the fields.

I'm wiping my sweat

in summer's furious blaze.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: When the Lilacs Were in Bloom (Hiromi Ohta)

The partnership that Takashi is best known for is not the one with Hosono. Nor is it the one with Ohtaki, despite A Long Vacation. The really big deal is Kyohei Tsutsumi. Called the "golden duo," Tsutsumi and Matsumoto wrote nearly five hundred songs together, mainly between 1975 and 1990.

So naturally, Tsutsumi's name came up a lot as I ventured into the post-Happy End Matsumoto world. The most famous song they wrote was for Hiromi Ohta. Looking for the album that had that song on it, I mistakenly cued up 1976's Handmade Art Book instead, but the mistake didn't matter, because the album opener was fantastic. And it wasn't the only song to sound awesome on first listen. So I kept on listening, and listening, and listening, and now love all eleven. And Handmade Art Book (Tezukuri no Gashuu) is just one of eight Ohta records that are essentially all Tsutsumi/Matsumoto.

Across those eight '70s albums, a few singles, and selected songs on records from the '80s and beyond, Takashi provided the lyrics to one hundred and one Hiromi Ohta songs. I've been thinking that it would be fun to translate the complete set. But I wanted to start modest, like with some obscure album track, or better yet, a non-album B-side. Which is why you're now reading this post about 1975's When the Lilacs Were in Bloom (Tsutsumi/Matsumoto).

Takashi has always (at least starting with Kazemachi Roman, and certainly on into the '80s) been interested in detail. This song hinges on one such, and I almost missed it. I'd been thinking, "Hmm, so is this what Takashi's hack work looks like? Must've took him five minutes to write. It's a pity, since Tsutsumi's music is good." But then at some point it hit me that the flower references were not there just for the hazy vibes (writing a love song? gotta have flowers, lots of flowers). It's that the narrator is focusing all her attention on that single hair adornment, and letting that one object stand in for the whole relationship.

It may not be an example of Takashi's best writing, but it's not hack work either. Mea culpa. The words are indeed worthy of Tsutsumi's tune. Maybe even of those horn lines.

It's interesting to note that, six years later — maybe because the phrase had been tucked away here on a non-album B-side, far out of sight — Takashi transplanted the "I want to meet you, and I cannot meet you" motif/wordplay and reworked it into the chorus of The Wind is Rising.

:::

I cried as I was dreaming.

My white pillow

shows the traces of tears.

I want to meet you, and I cannot meet you,

and my heart is trembling.

Oh, please let your kindness come my way.

I have a hair adornment

plaited with lilac blooms.

I'll hold on to it, just in case we meet again.

The colors of the flowers are fading away —

and now love will be vanishing too, I guess.

Even the lingering scent of a kiss

is becoming a miserable memory.

Oh, please let your kindness come my way.

But though the lilac flowers, 

having bloomed,

will scatter soon,

I am not going to forget you, not ever —

you who have vanished 

deep inside of a dream.

(Back to: List of Translations)