The song was a one-off collaboration with folk(-rock?) band Itsutsu no Akai Fusen, whom St. Michel recommends and who do seem fascinating — other tracks from the same album (I'm All Alone in a Vast Wilderness) sound terrific, and an album from the previous year begins with a 23-minute song. The music for Marriage Negotiations is by Takashi Nishioka, who normally also handled lyric duties. Is it Nishioka who's singing? The vocals are fantastic.
I keep running into songs that make me think, "Okay, this has got to be one of Takashi's absolute all-time best, it simply has to be," because, come on, how much better can songs get? This is another (like Drifting Clouds, Rainy Station, or Takahashi & Sakamoto's Farewell) that I worked on with tears pouring out of my eyes. And I mean, for minutes straight. I would get a sense of what a line meant — start crying — then I'd get to work hammering out the exact meaning — all while crying, crying, crying.
So I have to sound the familiar chorus: for Takashi Matsumoto's sake, learn Japanese, o lover of song!
Because as much as I can get the content and sometimes tone across (I've said this before too, but it bears repeating), the precise musicality of Takashi's writing fades away in translation, and besides, if you understand the Japanese words, you get another dagger to the heart in the form of (?)Nishioka's phrasing/vocal delivery. There's something insanely moving in the "a-" syllables that he precedes a lot of words with (a quirk of regional pronunciation?). Nor can translation convey the power of the long breaks between "a-chotto" (ちょっと) and the half-lines that end each verse. Not to mention that I couldn't find a single word that would stand in for ちょっと each time, whereas in Japanese, the repetition (once per verse, always at the start of the last line) is a crucial gambit. (And makes me wonder to what extent Hosono's own "makes me cry each time I listen" masterpiece, I'm Sort Of, was influenced by Marriage Negotiations.)
St. Michel glosses the scene beautifully, so go read his essay. For my own part, I want to note how intense and complex the emotion driving the song is. I can't pinpoint it — I mean, that's one of the reasons these lyrics are so moving. The term 縁談 (the song's title) implies an arranged marriage — a topic that could never have made it into a Happy End song! — and the narrator does keep a certain distance — a certain interested, or even happy, distance? — from Kyou. He never calls her his fiancée. He never even admits outright that it's him who'll be marrying her, not in so many words. The song is suffused with a wistfulness or pensiveness that I can't describe.
What exactly is on the narrator's mind? Is it that, like St. Michel suggests, the boy is mourning his youth, which this engagement marks the end of? Does he think the engagement meal is wasted on him, or is he in awe of the process? — of the marriage negotiations, the celebration meal, and all that will soon follow — specifically, the change in the relationship between himself and Kyou — the mystery, strangeness, and struggle of marriage itself.
Or is the song's core a fascination with the kind of person his wife-to-be might become — given that it's his fiancée's grandmother that he's telling us all about? After all, he does spend time describing Kyou as she used to be — his childhood friend — as well as the young woman she is right now (he still calls her Kyou-chan, by the way, implying a lingering sense of intimacy or affection) — her clothing, her bearing. Is it because he can't wait to find out who exactly it is he'll be marrying? — not just her present self, but her potential future self too; not just her present life, but her future life — and thus, by extension, his own?
Or is it that the boy is marveling at the family (and, by extension, tradition) he is about to become a part of? Or is it that he feels disconcerted because, by inserting himself into it, he's disrupting the continuity of that family? That family/tradition (like the rice dumpling / mitarashi dango stand) might seem to him to have a beautiful, unbroken flow to it — until he showed up — and in marrying him, Kyou will soon be his wife more than she will be her grandmother's granddaughter...
Or does the song end with a reference to loneliness because the narrator believes that not even marriage to a childhood friend is going to fend his own loneliness off?
How dense and layered can a song that's nominally about rice dumplings and tofu get?
:::
The old lady who runs the rice dumpling stand
always looks so cheerful
even though she's over eighty.
She spends her entire day in the sun
and her hands tend to tremble a little.
As a kid, I was friends with her granddaughter Kyou,
who seems so busy these days,
clip-clopping around from morning to night
in red-strapped geta slippers.
I guess she has grown into something of a woman.
The meal they prepared today is amazing.
After all, the negotiations for Kyou's marriage are over,
and everything is settled now.
Frozen-dried tofu with dried jack mackerel
is really on the sumptuous side.
The old lady who runs the rice dumpling stand
works there all day long
since it's a really old and well-known shop,
at least in this neighborhood of ours.
From now on I suppose she'll be a little lonely.
