Eigo Kawashima/Yoshie Kashiwabara -- Sake to Namida to Otoko to Onna （酒と泪と男と女）

As I've mentioned in a number of the articles here, my times at Kuri were filled with friends and other warblers singing Seiko-chan, Checkers, Akina, and Anzen Chitai. There were the usual clinking of glasses and happy banter to go along with the passing of the microphone and the slips of paper to the bartender with the next song selection. However, there were a couple of songs regularly sung at the old Yorkville karaoke bar that "stopped the presses", so to speak. One was Shinji Tanimura's（谷村新司） "Subaru", and the other was sung by an old friend of mine, Kaoru, whom I haven't seen in over a quarter of a century since he returned to Japan in the late 80s. Kaoru was the kindest, purest soul but he didn't hesitate in pulling off some of the craziest stunts such as Strip Rock-Scissors-Paper (he lost, by the way.....completely) when he knocked back a few.

However, his 18-ban at Kuri was such that people usually stopped whatever they were doing to listen. The song was Eigo Kawashima's（河島英五）"Sake to Namida to Otoko to Onna"(Booze and Tears and Men and Women) which was composed and written by the singer in 1976. The way the lyrics and the melody worked together, anyone with a decent voice would've slammed it out of the park. That is not to say that the song is a simple ditty at all. Kawashima just wove this song with so much heart and depth that anyone singing or listening to it would have known how to treat it. It was no surprise that Kaoru often had a lot of folks singing along with him.

According to J-Wiki, the Osaka-born Kawashima started his music career by starting up a band called Homo Sapiens in 1970 which released a couple of albums and five singles before it broke up in 1976. Kawashima then went on with a solo career with "Sake to Namida to Otoko to Onna" as his debut. Through his music, he often related about various aspects of what it was like to be a man: strengths, weaknesses, the emotions of being a father. This song here brings together the dramatic dynamic of the four elements in the title to talk about a man's crushing frustration and how he chooses to keep it at bay.

This performance by Kawashima is how I've always heard "Sake to Namida to Otoko to Onna" through my friend, Kaoru. Unlike the somewhat more proudly delivered recorded version in the video right at the top, the singer, looking a bit disheveled at the piano, had more gravel and anguish in his delivery. If Tom Waits could sing in Japanese, I think I know the song for him. The surprising thing about it, though, is that despite the feeling of well-worn years, it had been written by Kawashima when he was just 19....just one year shy of becoming an official adult in Japan.

The song itself was released in June 1976, and after 18 months, it finished in the 1977 yearly rankings at the No. 43 position, with almost 300,000 records sold. Kawashima made his breakthrough with this song, impressing other singers with the force of his voice. And he would make it to the Kohaku Utagassen in 1991 with "Jidai Okure"（時代おくれ）. Unfortunately, a decade later, he would pass away prematurely at the age of 48 from liver disease.

(Sorry but music163 is dead.)

The song has been covered by a number of artists such as Hideki Saijo and 70s group, BORO, but I wanted to show former 80s aidoru Yoshie Kashiwabara's（柏原芳恵） cover of it. Though with the lyrics unchanged, she sings it from the man's point of view (or grammar), Kashiwabara gives her own weary seen-it-all, heard-it-all torch song performance. The voice is unmistakably the Kashiwabara from 30 years ago but with a timbre that suggests that not all of those three decades were filled with frills and cuteness. Her version is on one of two cover albums she recorded in 2007 titled "Encore".

One final piece of trivia gleaned from the J-Wiki article for Kawashima is that there is/was a watering hole in Nairobi, Kenya called The Green Bar. It had a jukebox which amongst its records also contained the single of his most famous song. Apparently, whenever Japanese tourists came into the bar for a drink, the owners would play "Sake to Namida to Otoko to Onna". The story went that Kawashima, who often traveled around the world, made a stop at The Green Bar. When he identified himself as a Japanese singer, no one would believe him, so he just left the record along with his bill (why he just happened to have a 45"single on his person at the time is beyond me). As for the Green Bar itself, I looked it up but it may have been closed down since 2010.