Translation: The Garden's Nice and Warm (Chu Kosaka)

In 1971, Chu Kosaka signed a "three albums in three years" deal with his label Mushroom. He didn't quite manage to get enough songs together for the first of the three, Arigatou, which is why his best friend Haruomi Hosono ended up contributing three songs.

Then, before you know it, it was 1972, and Kosaka — an incredible songwriter, but not a fast one — had written exactly three new songs. Or, okay, four, if you count one called Waiting for Spring, which he'd contributed to the Hosono-produced Japanese country music supergroup project Country Pumpkin (Hosono had two of his own originals on there, one of which likewise found a second home on Hosono House). But even counting Waiting for Spring, four new songs did not an album make.

Solution: record a Tokyo show with the touring band you put together in your artist commune neighborhood, to whom your wife gave the name Four Joe Half, most members of which (drummer Tatsuo Hayashi, keyboardist Masataka Matsutoya, and pedal steel guitarist Hiroki Komozawa) would head next door the following year to record Hosono House and (in Hayashi & Matsutoya's case, while Komozawa stuck around as an adjunct) become Caramel Mama.

The album was Motto Motto (kind of untranslatable out of context: maybe "More, More", echoing the audience's demands as a concert ends; but the phrase is drawn from the lyrics to Because I Love You, and nowhere in my English version does the phrase "more, more" appear as such; literally, it's something like "[Grammatical Intensifier], [Grammatical Intensifier]"). Six songs from Arigatou, one from Country Pumpkin, and the three fully new ones. 

Hosono and Shigeru Suzuki showed up too, guesting on a couple tracks, and received rapturously by the audience — I guess if you were at a Kosaka show in 1972, you knew exactly who Happy End were!

The new songs on Motto Motto — including this one here, The Garden's Nice and Warm (Kosaka/Kosaka) — are so awesome that I wish there had been more of them — ideally, enough for a second album in the uber-gentle folk-barely-rock Arigatou vein. The third Mushroom Kosaka album, 1973's Hazukashi sou ni, is terrific in its own right (ten new Kosaka originals!!!) but it's already leaning folk-soul — not a bad thing! It's just that, by then, Kosaka was leaving the Arigatou/Motto Motto sound behind. 

On Arigatou, Kosaka's city boy reveries-slash-travelogues of the country could be totally convincing or transparently fake, but come Motto Motto, the Sayama countryside had seeped into the blood. The quiet domestic bliss in the new songs is as real as it gets. I love that, in the first verse, Kosaka's wife is pissed off at him — mind you, they stayed together until Kosaka's death.

A note about the cat: when I was translating Arigatou, I really wanted to mention the fact that Hosono's cat was given him by Kosaka. What is friendship, if not the offer of a cat from your household to adopt?! But I couldn't find an appropriate place to mention it. 

Well, and now here it is: that's Omi-chan's cat who has slipped into his former caretaker's garden. 

:::

If you open the window,

the gentle fragrance

of winter daphnes

comes indoors

and even your angry expression

turns into a glad one.

The garden's nice and warm.

I'm feeling cheerful.

The garden's nice and warm.

I'm feeling cheerful.

If you open the window,

the gentle fragrance

of winter daphnes

comes indoors.

The cat from next door

is stretched out in the sun,

half-asleep.

The garden's nice and warm.

I'm feeling cheerful.

The garden's nice and warm.

I'm feeling cheerful.

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