Kaya Saeki -- Perfume wo Nokosenai/Hitomi de Sasayaite （パフュームを残せない・瞳で囁いて）

I just came across this one purely by accident while I was browsing through YouTube looking for a song by another singer. I'd never heard of Kaya Saeki（佐伯伽耶）but when I heard her debut single "Perfume wo Nokosenai" (Can't Leave Any Perfume), I was quickly hooked. To be honest, I thought that Saeki had done this in the 80s just from how it sounded but it actually came out in October 1994. I've always been a bit of a sucker for Latin/AOR when it came from singers like Keiko Maruyama（丸山圭子）or Ruiko Kurahashi（倉橋ルイ子）, and Saeki seems to be into that sort of music.

According to J-Wiki, she was scouted while she was working in a Ginza nightclub as a pianist and entered show business in 1992. As well as entering the music industry, Saeki had a stint as an actress, but both aspects of her time in the geinokai were pretty short apparently. She only released 4 singles (no albums) between late 1994 and 1997 before calling it a day. For "Perfume wo Nokosenai", it was written by Yasushi Akimoto (the AKB 48 maestro) and composed by Chika Ueda (who had also helped on a lot of Miki Imai's songs in the early part of her career). The song certainly has that champagne-at-a-soiree feeling to it. The song was also used as the ending theme for a rather esoteric late-night show on Fuji-TV called "Rooms" that was on during the mid to late 90s. I used to catch it a fair bit before getting my shuteye since I also liked the ending themes such as one by Kaoru Nakahara（中原薫）. And I also just came across another "Rooms" ending theme by Kenjiro Sakiya（崎谷健次郎）on YouTube that I quite like and will talk about later.

The coupling song is "Hitomi de Sasayaite" (Whisper With Your Eyes), another swooning nighttime tune to be enjoyed with a bit of that bubbly. It was actually used for a soup pasta commercial, but hey, soup pasta can be made classy, too, with a bit of garnish. The lyrics are also by Akimoto but the melody was created by Masayuki Kishi（岸正之）.

The CD single went as high as No. 50 on the Oricon rankings.