Well, considering that the annual Harvest Moon Festival has gone through Asia, I thought this would be a pretty appropriate song to put up for Autumn. In Japan, there is the tradition of tsukimi, or moon-viewing, but I never got any invitations to a moon-viewing party by anyone during my time there. Basically, the closest I got was buying the seasonal Tsukimi Burger at McDonalds.
In any case, I also chose Misato Watanabe's（渡辺美里） 13th single, "Moonlight Dance" since it stands out from a lot of those high-energy tunes displaying her boomer of a voice. Coming out in June 1989, "Moonlight Dance" is more of a nocturnal eerie and atmospheric song about love long lost, and has Misato going a bit more sotto voce. Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉） was responsible for the darker melody; if it were made sentient and tangible, it would be lurking and sneaking through the shadows. Meanwhile, Misato's words by themselves talk about a happier romantic past gradually going into the sadder present, but they've been given a more sinister edge by the music. And one line in the refrain, "Someday, wouldn't you like to have a moonlight dance with me?"(using the Japanese male 1st-person pronoun) hints at the protagonist being someone like the tragic Phantom of the Opera....a damaged man of doom who still tries to lure a woman into his world. I can forgive myself for thinking that this was custom-made for Halloween, and the fact that it was her 13th single is not lost on me.
I first heard the song in a revised form on her 1992 album of self-covers, "Hello Lovers". But I prefer the 1989 original since Komuro does a great job with the synthesizers. It went as high as No. 2 on the Oricon weeklies and it became the 45th-ranked song of the year. It was also a track on her 1989 album, "Flower Bed" which was her 4th of 7 albums in a row to hit the No. 1 spot.
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