Translation: Come On, Spring! (Happy End)

Come On, Spring! (Ohtaki/Matsumoto) and A Rainy Day in December were the first two sets of lyrics Takashi wrote for Happy End. Rainy Day is more or less what you'd expect a precocious new lyricist, steeped in the poetry of his country, to come out with. But Come On, Spring! is something else entirely. It's like if Van Morrison had written Astral Weeks for the first Them album, or if Cheap Day Return had appeared on This Was instead of Aqualung. Nobody's supposed to get this good this soon.

So it's a bit of a relief that Yudemen's powerful opening trifecta is followed by a whole bunch more lyrics where Takashi is clearly just figuring things out. "Ah. He is human, after all." Yeah, sort of, except that less than a year later he was writing Kazemachi Roman, and in short order, Sons of Sun's Kaizoku Kid no Bouken.

Ohtaki-as-vocalist was, similarly, one of the Seven Wonders of 1970, and he would only get better as the decade wore on.

This song can't but resonate harder for someone living in Japan or China than it would those living in the west — is my guess — in that the weight of the Spring Festival, as the Chinese call it, or Oshogatsu, as the Japanese do, is a hard thing to get a feel for in Europe or North America. From an American perspective, imagine rolling Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve into a single holiday. So when the narrator of the song talks about the bite of loneliness, about how he can't bear to hear the temple bells doing the traditional hundred-and-eight New Year's Eve tolls, he's not being melodramatic.



:::



When you think of New Year's Eve,
you think of everybody
snuggled inside the kotatsu together,
eating rice cake stew
and playing cards.

This year,
I'm greeting the New Year by myself.
The ringing of the temple bells
is so lonely
I have to cover my ears.

If I hadn't fled home like I did,
I could be wishing everyone
a happy new year right this moment.
Did I mess something up
somewhere along the way?

But I put absolutely everything I had at stake.
All I can do now is try my luck.
It can't be long before spring arrives...

can it?

If I hadn't fled home like I did,
I could be wishing everyone
a happy new year right this moment.
Did I mess something up
somewhere along the way?

But I put absolutely everything I had at stake.
All I can do now is try my luck.
It can't be long before spring arrives...

can it?

Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!
Come on, spring!



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