Translation: Tales of First Love (Norihiko Hashida & Endless)

1972 was the year of the epic Hiro Yanagida collaborations and, of course, the final (and still my favorite) Happy End album. By 1974, Takashi Matsumoto was establishing himself as a professional lyricist. Inbetween was 1973, which is when most of the work (if not actual releases) of Takashi's great Production Year was getting done. Lyrics were on the backburner.

Among the few he did write in '73 is Tales of First Love (Hashida/Matsumoto), recorded by Norihiko Hashida & Endless. A great overview of Takashi's work in the early '70s points out that his lyrics here are "not particularly virtuosic." Right: they're too general and abstracted, and on the sappy side (althoooough Takashi may not be fully to blame for that; consider the title of the non-Matsumoto B-side, "Youth is a Journey of Tears", and you can see the vibe Hashida, or Hashida's label, was going for). 

But one does not leave the best band in the world and go straight to writing trash. The second verse, for instance ("we were tickling..."), is pretty great — there's an element of startled wonder in the Japanese that I couldn't figure out a way to get across in English. And the chorus, while labored, and unnecessarily dense, says something real and disquieting.

Call it growing pains, maybe. Speaking with Shigeru Suzuki about Heroine of the Skyscraper (Matsumoto's contribution to the Happy End era's begun/then scrapped/but ultimately transfigured "four solo albums" project), Takashi laughed and said, "Happy End would have instantly rejected a song titled Heroine of the Skyscraper." They would have rejected Tales of First Love too, on artistic rather than thematic grounds. But the thing is, if you're trying to move your art somewhere new, you're bound to take some wrong turns here and there; and without those wrong turns, you wouldn't know which way you should actually go.

Besides, it's a good song. The melodicism and drive of Hashida's tune shore up the places where Takashi fumbles, while the slightly askew manner in which Takashi goes about writing a conventional love song / youth anthem does the same for the unadventurous early-'70s folk-pop arrangement.

Plus, it's addictive: I've played it thirty times today alone.



:::



We were busy

with our bittersweet kisses.

Our fingers intertwined,

we smiled and daydreamed

about love.

A first love is like the wind —

transparent, lemon-yellow wind

that blows and blows among the seasons

we've forgotten.

And time keeps flowing 

ever forward.

All this happened

long ago.

We were busy

tickling each other's ears

with our whispers.

We were spilling

radiant love 

over our hands.

A first love is like the wind —

transparent, lemon-yellow wind

that blows and blows among the seasons

we've forgotten.

But you are someone

I remember:

a girl I knew once,

long ago.

A first love is like the wind —

transparent, lemon-yellow wind

that blows and blows among the seasons

we've forgotten.

But you are someone

I remember:

a girl I knew once,

long ago.

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