Translation: The Thread that Pulls the Well Bucket Up (Chu Kosaka)

The Thread that Pulls the Well Bucket Up is an Akiko Yano song that the Horo liner notes credit to Akiko Suzuki, because Akiko (who was essentially a full-time member of Tin Pan Alley by that point, stepping in for the marvelous Masataka Matsutoya, who had diverged away from Hosono's Caramel Mama operations so that he could focus better on musical collaborations with his wife-to-be, then still known as Yumi Arai — which is not to suggest that the Caramel Mama guys left Masataka + Yumi behind! Hosono visited various Yumi albums in various capacities, or sent Hideki Matsutake in his stead; and Shigeru Suzuki and Tatsuo Hayashi remained mainstays of the personnel on Yumi albums for years) hadn't yet married Makoto Yano (a genius arranger and frequent Takashi Matsumoto collaborator in the years just after Happy End).

The title turns on a pun: the 糸 in つるべ糸 ("ito," meaning thread) is a mere shift of a consonant away from 井戸, ("ido," meaning water well). In the Chu's Café episode about this song, Kosaka lingers appreciatively over Yano's image, recalling a job he once had, hauling water from a well. "You need a good solid rope to pull the bucket out," he notes. "A mere thread would, of course, be too thin!"

Akiko's own version of the song closes her odds-and-sods second album, Iroha ni Kompeito (perhaps better known as the dolphin album), under a different title: The Cold Wind from the Mountains (The East Wind). 

Incidentally, also appearing on that Yano album is her cover of Horo's title track Wandering, as well as Hosono's Sharing an Umbrella from Happy End's third album (from which Hosono and Kosaka also drew for Horo, revisiting Suzuki/Matsumoto's Sketch from the Month of Sleet and Hosono's Wanderer) (for Akiko's Umbrella, see here). 

All this interconnectivity naturally stems from the fact that, as you (dear reader) are perfectly aware, the Hosonoverse is woefully short on connections between the people and projects involved. I mean — it's as if the people in this circle were hardly interacting at all! Couldn't they have produced each other's albums occasionally?! They were all living in the same damn city, weren't they? At least throw in a guest spot here and there, for god's sake, come on.

:::

The autumn days

end early,

the sun like a bucket

dropping down a well.

My fingers turn numb

as I walk home.

I'm blowing kisses

at the trembling city.

The moon's gaze

keeps me safe.

I'm feeling warm

inside.

And you, east wind —

oh whimsical wind that you are —

at last I have the chance

to talk with you.

There isn't a single wave

on the ocean of my heart.

You alone are floating

ever forward in it,

ever forward in it.

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