Yumi Matsutoya -- Fuyu no Owari （冬の終わり）

Well, it's one of the pitfalls of doing this blog when you can't import the original song from YouTube but for a bit of a taste, you can listen to this person doing a Yuming rendition of "Fuyu no Owari".

(incredible monomane!)

Now, as nikala and I have been mentioning in some of the other recent profiles, it's been a long and pretty snowy Winter this year in the Toronto area, and we're all ready for that blast of Spring which is officially less than a week away. So, in the hopes of that, I've decided to talk about this lovely ballad by Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実） which was a track on her 24th album, "Tears and Reasons", released in November 1992. I will devote an article on the entire album sometime in the near future so I will let it go at that for now.

As for "Fuyu no Owari"(The End of Winter), it's one of my favourite tracks from the album, and musically, it has always struck me as the start of the transition from her late 80s synths-heavy period to a slightly more natural keyboard sound with more lushness in the strings department. I chose the track today to signal the end of the season, but the lyrics actually go more into an end of a phase of life. Yuming sings about remembering an old friend from school who, with the advent of graduation (which takes place in March in Japan), parted ways with her in the sad but perhaps inevitable fashion that some school friendships go. I have one student who I taught a quarter-century ago in Gunma Prefecture who is now living a life with her own family in the United States....she knows I have this blog; perhaps someday, she may give me some insight.

I can fairly promise that if this song were to be played sometime in the days before the graduation ceremony in a junior high or high school, there would be tears shed. "Fuyu no Owari"is just one of the many examples of Yuming reflecting on the slices of life that is almost universal.