Gen Takayama -- Kokoro Koorasete（心凍らせて）

 

The above image was something that I whipped up back in the summer when I was doing the AI gallery for Kentaro Shimizu's（清水健太郎）"Shitsuren Resutoran" (失恋レストラン...Heartbreak Restaurant）, but I think the image will also come in handy for this particular song, too.

Enka is a genre that has managed to survive pretty comfortably into the 2020s with some of its songs hitting the Oricon Top 10, but I think it's safe to say that its heyday was a few decades ago, between the 1950s and 1980s. So, when I hear of an enka tune that hit the really big time going into the final decade of the 20th century, my attention is caught.

That's where Gen Takayama's（高山厳）song "Kokoro Koorasete" (Freeze My Heart) comes in. Takayama had started his music career partnered up with Hirofumi Bamba（ばんばひろふみ）and Hiroshi Imai（今井ひろし）in the folk group Banban（バンバン）in 1971 before going solo in 1975. There had been some lean years before his 14th single from August 1992 was released, but when it did, "Kokoro Koorasete", an elegant enka/New Adult Music ballad about a man possibly on the verge of losing his significant other if not already, became a huge long-running hit for the next couple of years, selling over 750,000 copies.

The song was composed by veteran Keisuke Hama（浜圭介）with lyrics by Toyohisa Araki（荒木とよひさ）, who had also written Teresa Teng's（テレサテン）"Tsugunai"（つぐない）, a song that I compare with "Kokoro Koorasete" in terms of similar tone and rhythm. "Kokoro Koorasete" went Platinum as it hit No. 10 on the Oricon weeklies. In the yearly rankings, the ballad managed to become the 85th-ranked single for 1993 and even clawed further up the chart the following year to finish in the No. 58 spot. It also won a number of awards and earned Takayama his one and only appearance on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen at the end of 1993 to give his quiet and tenderhearted performance.