Translation: Come On, Spring! (Happy End)

Come On, Spring! (Ohtaki/Matsumoto) and A Rainy Day in December were the first two songs 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 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 soon after that, Sons of Sun's Kaizoku Kid no Bouken and Marriage Negotiations.

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

I think this song has to resonate more for someone living in Japan or China than 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 sting 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
inside the kotatsu together,
eating rice cake stew
and playing cards.

This year,
I'm greeting the New Year all alone.
The ringing of the temple bells
is so lonesome
I have to cover my ears.

If I hadn't fled home,
I could be giving everyone my best wishes
right this moment.

Did I mess something up
along the way somewhere?

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

can it?

If I hadn't fled home,
I could be giving everyone my best wishes
right this moment.
Did I mess something up
along the way somewhere?

But I put absolutely everything I had at stake.
All that 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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