Caoli Cano -- Gensou Game（幻想ゲーム）

Oh, goofy me! All this time, I was looking forward to putting up this song by singer-songwriter and sake brewmaster (more on that later) Caoli Cano（かの香織）, and I had thought all this time that it was pronounced "Rensou Game"（連想ゲーム）instead of the accurate "Gensou Game". So I had been wondering why Cano wanted to name this beautifully dreamy song after NHK's version of the American game show "Password".

Actually "Gensou Game" is translated as "Fantasy Game" and it is a track from her July 1991 debut solo album "Fine". Cano started out as a vocalist and songwriter of the 1980s pop/New Wave band Cioccolata（ショコラータ）formed from her music circle at Waseda University which lasted from 1982 to 1986. I'm gonna have to look further into Cioccolata's music since the J-Wiki article for Cano described their output as often merging Italian opera and contemporary pop music!

But as for "Gensou Game", it's one of those tunes by Cano that struck me as one of those desired rarities (to me, anyways) that occupies a fuzzy-walled intersection within a three-lobed Venn diagram. It has elements of bossa nova, Shibuya-kei and good old-fashioned pop but it also seems to have its own identity that I can't quite categorize. Anyways, the track is splendid enough, especially with that warm and woodsy guitar in the intro and Cano's breathy vocals that I wouldn't mind making an attempt to get my own copy of "Fine".

Although she's still officially active, her albums and singles go as far as the mid-2000s. However, one thing I found out in her biography is that in the early 2000s, after training as an apprentice, she became the 12th generation sake brewmaster at the Hasamaya Brewery（はさまや酒造店）in her native Miyagi Prefecture.