Ostensibly about a circus troupe (like another of my favorite songs on earth, Places Where You Never See the Snow by Antonia and Peter Stampfel... here's a shoddy, but well-meant, cover by a musician with the initials S.A.S., and a live version by Peter himself), but the splendid images the narrator lines up one after the next, verse after verse, are just imaginative extrapolations. He's never seen the circus. The whole song is based on hearsay. The terse refrain reveals that the narrator is trapped in the dismal prison of a bland family and a bland town. The circus never actually comes; it's up to him to dream it up.
Just as it was up to the twenty-year-old Takashi to overlay the fantasy-construct of the Town of Wind onto the dismal, depleted neighborhoods of post-Olympics Aoyama. But when he cast the spell, he cast it carefully and thoroughly, much like the boy in The Mysterious Traveling Circus, whose conjured-up circus is more vivid than any I've ever been to.
Haruomi Hosono got caught inside Takashi's spell too. A lifelong Tokyoite, Hosono has said that there were only two times he ever truly loved the city: first, in the Happy End era, between 1970 and 1972, when it seemed to him that he really was living in Takashi's mystical Town of Wind; and again for a brief spell in 1975, when his rediscovery of Martin Denny and exotica helped him look at Tokyo the way he felt dazzled foreigners of yore must have seen it.
Hosono's described the period of explosive creativity leading up to Tropical Dandy as a high that lasted months; and the magic of living in the Town of Wind was so sweet that (like the way I think about opium daily even though it's been a year since I was hospitalized and got morphine in my IV drip), years later, he was still chasing that feeling. "The Professor wrote a song about Tokyo for our second album, called Technopolis. I tried to brainwash myself into believing that that's where I was living, a cybernetic city of the future. Like I'd once lived in the Town of Wind... but it didn't work."
Getting back to this Sons of Sun song... for reasons that I bet will be lost forever to the mists of time (unlike the mystery of No Wind's parrot), Hiro Yanagida had an odd penchant for cutting the lyrics of Takashi songs a little bit short — though "penchant" may be unfair, I think it only happened twice. One of those times is in this song's refrain. Takashi's original text has a two-line refrain, which goes: "Shut your children away / inside a house that never dreams" (子供を隠せ 夢をみないうちに) — an injunction to parents, warning them against the threat of the circus, coming to upend the customary order of things.
For the Sons of Sun version, Hiro excised the first half, leaving just "inside a house that never dreams," repeated twice. Unlike his other edit, in I Passed through Your Town, I think this was an inspired move — not because the refrain is better without its first half, but because it shifts the focus in an interesting way back to the narrator himself. When there's no reference to the parents, the refrain turns into a dose of elegiac self-reflection, its grammar inconclusive, as if the constraints of the family home were so tight that the narrator, describing it, can't even find the space to articulate a full sentence.
Another variance is that in the third verse, Mao sings of a saffron sky (サフラン色). The LP lyric sheet concurs. But in Takashi's original text, as published in The Wind Quartets, the word is "scarlet sage" (サルビア色). I suspect Hiro saw a four-character katakana word beginning with サ and his mind read saffron. Takashi's image is far the more vivid one.
So this translation is a bit of a mongrel, keeping the chorus as Mao sings it (to reflect the eerie power of that curtailed chorus line), but restoring the color of the sunset.
:::
I hear that whenever
that amazing traveling circus comes around,
the whole town goes into an uproar.
When they're putting up their dark tent,
even the wind comes howling by.
The sound of the orchestra's clarinet
paints the dusty signboard
in rainbow colors.
The ringmaster in the bowler hat is laughing.
Inside a house that never dreams.
Inside a house that never dreams.
I hear that whenever
that amazing traveling circus comes around,
the whole town goes into an uproar.
When someone's swinging on that dark trapeze,
even the wind comes howling by.
Inside a house that never dreams.
Inside a house that never dreams.
The clown dances
an ecstatic dance,
his red clothes fluttering
in a sunset of scarlet sage.
The ringmaster in the bowler hat is laughing.
(Back to: List of Translations)
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