Translation: The Boy with a Slight Fever (Shigeru Suzuki)

Shigeru Suzuki's first solo album Band Wagon was, according to Takashi, the final time he was able to tap into the vein that had yielded his Happy End-era work. 

The very first word on the album is 風街 (kazemachi, the Town of Wind) — was Takashi being defiant? His 100% art-foremost Great Production Year was ending, and he was stepping into the world of the pop charts, but here was Shigeru making an album and — unlike Haruomi and Eiichi — asking Takashi to write him lyrics, and while Shigeru would be happy if the album sold (it did) it wasn't a major consideration, since he had Caramel Mama. Artistry was paramount, seemed to be Shigeru's message. And so Takashi — as I imagine it — drew himself up and said: "Well then, thank you. Here the fuck I go."

Follow along with the recording so that you can hear the poetic diction, and the way Shigeru's phrasing enfolds the words, and tell me: wouldn't The Boy with a Slight Fever (Suzuki/Matsumoto) fit perfectly onto Kazemachi Roman? as a lyric, at least?

Shigeru was coming into his own as a songwriter at this point with a ferocity even more pronounced than what we'd seen on the last Happy End record. You'd never guess he was two years away from committing to syrupy, string-laden soft rock. 

Sometimes I think Band Wagon is one of the best albums ever made, sometimes I don't. The main problem is that its psych-funk-rock onslaught never relents — there is no slower material to offset the energy, no Sketch from the Month of Sleet or Freckled Girl — which makes it an exhausting listen. But if I play just Side A or just Side B, my conviction of the album's splendor returns. So maybe the thing to say is that Band Wagon is a good album consisting of two of the best album sides ever made.

Life has been crazy in ways pleasant (a three-year-old at home; marriage intact; forty new songs awaiting music/arrangement, and talented friends around eager to join the sessions; Morio Agata) and unpleasant (searching for a different job, health issues, getting brutalized by the consequences of a bad or at least insufficiently thought-out decision I made a couple years back... higher education felt like a black hole when I was finishing school in 2013 and seems to have become still darker and more voracious since) so I haven't been translating much. The other day I decided that one way to lift my spirits would be to get back into the young Takashi Matsumoto's embrace. Luckily there's still some material from the Happy End-and-just-after era that I haven't worked through: the back half of Hiro, Heroine of the Skyscraper, the Alas, No Mercy co-writes with Morio, and Band Wagon, which celebrates its 50th anniversary next month! I thought it over for a couple days and settled on Band Wagon. Spent another day thinking about which song to start with, and settled on this one. 

I drafted the translation in the evening. The next day, there was a Takashi post on Instagram about how a fan alerted him that Spotify had garbled a line of lyrics in one of his old songs — which song — well, what would you know, The Boy with a Slight Fever... you say coincidence, I say God's way of communicating, "Yes Sigismund exactly, translate more Matsumoto, it is the way forward." 

It's a wonderful garbling, by the way — it must have cracked Takashi up as hard as it did me, for him to post about it — it's the line 天井の木目 (tenjou no mokume), "the wood of the ceiling." Spotify contributed a tiny stroke to the second kanji, making it 天丼の木目 (tendon no mokume), "the wood grain of the tendon," a Japanese dish: "crisp tempura laid over freshly steamed rice and topped with a delicious light soy dressing" ... it's normal to see weird shit when you have a fever, that's the whole premise of the song, but 天丼の木目 would imply one hungry narrator.

:::

One rainy afternoon,

as I gripped the thermometer tight,

the wood of the ceiling wavered

and swayed

and melted away.

Taps against the window glass...

a boy in a baseball cap

smashing marbles with a stone

and scattering them in the sky.

"Look! Look! It's really happening!

The tramway's floating

away into the galaxy."

The sound of the faraway tram

spread from alley to alley

like an infection.

When I awoke, the room was empty

and nighttime was making 

its stealthy way inside.

"Look! Look! It's really happening!

The tramway's floating

away into the galaxy."

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: A Night on the Third Planet (Morio Agata)

My months of Takashi Matsumoto study led me, as was bound to happen, to the four albums he produced in that mysterious gray area between Happy End's dissolution and Matsumoto's decision to become a full-time lyricist. Takashi has noted wryly that although all four albums are recognized as timeless masterpieces now, they didn't sell anything at the time, and the toll they took on the young producer in terms of time and dedication was too heavy: he had a family that he wanted not only to support financially but also spend time with. 

And so the man who had fashioned Kazemachi Roman and Heroine of the Skyscraper, and who had helped bring Golden Lion, Alas No Mercy, and Who Will Offer This Child a Loving Hand into being, relinquished that side of his artistry... at least for a while, and at least in part.

Now, one of those four albums — Alas, No Mercy — was by Morio Agata, a friend of Happy End's whose 1970 debut album, The Gramophone (funereal lo-fi folk/punk that occasionally recalls Black Sabbath; but I don't think Agata would've had a chance to hear Sabbath yet) has Haruomi Hosono on bass.

I first became aware of Morio more than a year ago, as the singer of ヴヰクトリアルの夜, a Hosono composition that graces Agata's 1976 double album Zipangu Boy, which Hosono co-produced. Agata's vocals on that song being so wonderful, I tried the full album once but it didn't click, and I gave up at the end of Side C (a strange twist of fate; Side D is the best one and might have been enough to hook me into a second listen ... I mean, it seems amazing to me now that I could've been unmoved by all those soulful and ingenious songs on the first three sides too, but aren't things often so?).

Alas No Mercy, though, not only sounded gorgeous on the very first listen — coming to it with an ear for Takashi's production helped, but it was Agata's vocals that clinched the deal — it taught me how to listen to Zipangu Boy.

That was in early October of 2024. Now January '25 is ending. I hardly listened to anything except Morio Agata all autumn (and Electric Voyeur, the new Big Blood album). It turns out that not only is Agata one of my favorite singers and songwriters on earth, he has a discography as full and relentlessly wonderful as his friend Hosono's (except that Agata has gone on recording at least one new album a year, his most recent release is only three months old). Soon after Zipangu Boy clicked, I started wondering how much of that rampant genius Agata has managed to keep alive, and I tried an album from 2015, and then the new one, Orion's Forest, when it came out on October 30th. The answer was: all of it. 

A Night on the Third Planet (Agata/Agata) is the opener and sort-of title track of Agata's 2019 album (the Japanese title of the album is a little different; this song's name translates to the English title emblazoned on the back of the CD booklet). 

The album was recorded in the summer, in New York City. One evening Agata attended the screening of a film to which he'd contributed a song, and on display in the cinema lobby were a print and a sculpture by two artists from Aomori, where Agata had lived as a third grader. Agata's thoughts turned to the Nebuta Matsuri, a summer festival in Aomori that had left a deep impression on the young boy (as it would). The drums in the song are modeled after the festival drums. The verse lyrics (らっせらぁ) are, quoth Wikipedia, the "shortened dialectal version of 'irasshai,' calling visitors and customers to watch or join."

So there are hardly any words at all: or rather, there are lots of them, chanted and double/triple/quadruple-tracked, overlapping each other: but there are hardly any distinct words. But this is an elliptical set of lyrics, ripe for interpretation. 

Who is the speaker of that other line, the one that resists the invitation; the one about wanting to go home? Is it the songwriter in New York City, missing Japan — or, nostalgic for the Aomori summers of his childhood? Is it someone in Aomori on one of the nights of the festival, who has gotten caught up in the festival throng but doesn't want to be there (ala Festival of Mud)? Or some lonely wanderer on the outskirts of the city, who hears the festival in progress but skirts around it? Could it be the festival floats themselves, aching to reach the water? Or possibly the alien visitor to earth that the album title suggests, witness to but unmoved by the strange customs of the Third Planet...?

:::



Come join in. Come join in.
Come join, come join, come join in.
Come join in. Come join in.
Come join, come join, come join in.

I want to go home as soon as I can.
I want to go home as soon as I can.

Come join in. Come join in.
Come join, come join, come join in...

I want to go home as soon as I can...



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Bon Voyage Harbor (Chu Kosaka)

Bon Voyage Harbor (Hosono/Hosono) was such a favorite of Chu Kosaka's that he recorded it twice: first for 1975's Horo, and then, a little more slickly, for 1978's Morning. Ryuichi Sakamoto is on record as a fan of the Morning version.

It's an unusual composition, considering the date. It's darker and more stately than just about anything Harry wrote in the Tropical Trilogy years. Maybe Sultry Night is a cousin. 

:::

Midnight is twenty kilometers away.

Drops of gloom ooze from the sky.

Come along now, come along with me.

The city is about to break the surface.

Outside of time, just floating around —

the unmoored city — where love hides.

Come along now, come along with me

and, together, let's step over the night.

Bon voyage.

It's midnight

in the harbor of our hearts.

Bon voyage.

The harbor is twenty kilometers away.

The drops that form and drop from the waves

are made of memories.

Come along now, come along with me.

The sea is about to fall asleep.

Bon voyage.

It's midnight

in the harbor of our hearts.

Bon voyage.

Midnight is twenty kilometers away.

Drops of gloom ooze from the sky.

Come along now, come along with me

and, soaring, let us cross the night.

(Back to: List of Translations)