Translation: Schooldays Spent Daydreaming (Part 1) (Morio Agata)

Onwards to the second track, Schooldays Spent Daydreaming (Part 1) (Agata/Agata, arr. Moonriders): the second time a theme appears that will appear again later (in fact, very soon). The album is a labyrinth and even though I call it my favorite of all time, structural details go on surprising me. Such as the symmetry! Long-time listeners, compare Tracks A1 and A2 [1 and 2] with Tracks D4 and D5 [26 and 27] (the actual closer, D6 [28] has another story behind it, which I'll tell when we get there).



:::

The distant silver sea!

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And all of us enjoying

summer break together!

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And where are those terraced fields

swimming off to now?

Ever closer to the sea.

Ding-dong... dreaming days.

The distant silver country!

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And all along, the summer break!

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And where are those terraced fields

swimming off to now?

Ever closer to the sea.

Ding-dong... dreaming days.

And where are those terraced fields

swimming off to now?

Ever closer to the sea.

Ding-dong... dreaming days.

.

The boy is by no means a bad kid. He does, however, hate studying. Dozing away at his desk, he finds himself transformed into Sinbad; or else, gazing out the window at the shoreline, and paying no attention whatsoever to his lessons, he goes on great excursions to the distant islands of the south.

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Translation: Zipangu Boy (Morio Agata)

Hokkaido songwriter Morio Agata's Zipangu Boy (recorded late 1975, released early 1976, co-produced by Morio and Haruomi Hosono, with a band featuring Keiichi Suzuki's Moonriders and orchestration by Makoto Yano) might be my favorite album ever.

— on the basis of the music, at least. I've been eager to find out whether the lyrics are correspondingly great. So a few months back, after making sure it would have a lyric sheet, I bought a CD copy, but it turns out that said sheet is a tiny, lo-res reproduction of the lyrics from the original LP, which means that some of the rarer kanji and their furigana are unreadable. That's alright. I'll do my best.

Translating the whole album is some project, and I've been waiting for the right time to plunge in. I'm not sure now is the right time (note how I've only finished half of Shigeru Suzuki's Band Wagon) but I'm in the mood to get started, so here goes.

(I go on tinkering with translations months or years after I "publish" them to this page — that's how I work. So check back now and then if you're interested in versions that will be a little more accurate and a little more beautiful.)

Now raise the anchor!

...except oh yeah, we're sort of already in media res, since the first melody you hear is a reprise from an earlier Morio Agata record — that's how he works.

But soon enough the song proper — the title track — or okay, the first incarnation of the title track — Zipangu Boy (Agata/Agata), begins in earnest.

In the lyric sheet, many songs are followed by snippets of prose. These are exclusive to the booklet, neither spoken nor sung. I'll follow Agata's own typesetting, with the break marked by a dot and only paragraph, not line, breaks in the prose codas.

The "dragon king, Lord Ryujin" is a sea god from Japanese folklore who likes to visit people's dreams, particularly when the dreamer is on the verge of waking.



:::



That night,
I heard the ocean roaring
in the mountains behind our home.
It was moaning like a wildcat
all night long.
The ocean's pretty scary, huh...

My ear was infected
and hurt so much
I couldn't sleep.

Mom was crying,
facing the telephone.
Dad didn't say a word.

That night,
I heard the ocean roaring
in my own ear.
The dragon king, Lord Ryujin, was furious,
and my ear
was going crazy too.

I was on Dad's back.
We were heading home
from the village doctor's.

Mom was crying,
facing the telephone.
Dad didn't say a word.

.

Our protagonist is a young boy living on the coast of Japan, dreaming of far-flung southern isles. He's a sickly boy, however, always in and out of the doctor's. The boy's father is a sailor. The boy hopes that, when he grows up, he can be as strong and as cool as his dad. He dreams of travel to distant, unknown lands...



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Translation: The Woman in the Dunes (Shigeru Suzuki)

Shigeru returned to California to record Band Wagon, with a case of mild guilt about turning away from Caramel Mama, who had been working on his new songs alongside Hosono's Tropical Dandy and assorted other projects; but Shigeru felt the band's new exotica leanings were straying too far from what he needed, which was to make up for all the songs he didn't write as a member of Happy End.

He was in town when George Harrison and his gloomy Dark Horse tour came through. Shigeru went to see them, was besotted (and no surprise; look up the grainy AUDs that survive, they're awesome), got back to his hotel room, picked up his guitar, started playing around with the opening chords to My Sweet Lord, and came up with The Woman in the Dunes (Suzuki/Matsumoto).

Takashi borrowed the song's title from a Kobo Abe novel. In an interview a few years back, he called this set of lyrics his favorite of everything he's written. I can't see why — I think they're good, but not extraordinary — which probably means that I didn't understand the song and, by extension, that this translation isn't very good.

:::

Snow is gliding

on the wind.

Waves are thundering

as they crash

like bolts of lightning

on the shore.

"Your kind of landscape,

right?" you murmur

and turn your eyes away

in a desolate kind of way.

Come on,

quit joking around.

Your reckless gaze

draws the irritated lines

of a whirlpool of heat

on the water.

"Just say something

already, anything," you mutter,

your cheeks

frozen solid.

Come on,

quit joking around.

The grains of sand here

are as sharp as needles.

I hold you to me

as if to keep you safe.

Come on.

Let's go back to town.

Come on.

Let's go back to town...

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Translation: Expecting Rivers (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

I've been wrestling with the lyrics to Expecting Rivers (Takahashi's; music by Takahashi and Sakamoto) for over a year, on and off. Here's the least unsatisfactory version I've managed to date. I hope someday I can figure out a better one.

As for the song itself, well — what's there to say? If you swear by Naughty Boys the way I do, then it's already taken up residence in your heart.



:::



Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by

Now and then, on pitch-black nights, I go out walking.
We get swept away as we fumble along.

The river is splashing and flowing in its banks.
The water is the color of tears.
You are wavering, you’ve lost your way.
And me, I go wandering around.

Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by

The river is splashing and flowing in its banks.
The water is the color of tears.
You are wavering, you’ve lost your way.
And me, I go wandering around.

Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by

Now and then, on pitch-black nights, I go out walking.
We got swept away as we fumbled along.

Above the gliding river
where the water is brimming over,
you are shaking, you are trembling,
and I get up, since it's time.

We put the oars to the water
and the boat makes good progress.
Let's ply onward, you and I,
laughing as we go.

Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by

We put the oars to the water
and the boat makes good progress.
Let’s ply onward, you and I,
laughing as we go.

Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by



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