Higurashi -- Orange Iro no Densha （オレンジ色の電車）

Whoo...it's been a while since I put up a Higurashi（日暮し）song. But I think it's a good time to get one in here. We're at the end of March, the weather is slowly warming up after another long, harsh winter, and perhaps something nice and nostalgic would be fine here.

I'm currently going the usual pile of translation assignments. The afternoon is usually the difficult time since it's a long haul between lunch and dinner, and a lot of the energy is spent digesting lunch which means getting hit with a spate of drowsiness...not the best thing when you're concentrating on converting Japanese into English. So it was time to throw in a CD into the hard drive, and so I went with the BEST compilation for this fairly obscure folk band from the 1970s.

However, as I said on the first article I did for Higurashi, there's something personal between me and them since I had been searching for the lone song that I had known without being able to know the title. Luckily, when I finally deciphered the title as "Aki no Tobira"（秋の扉）, the door did definitely open and I was able to get a CD of their best stuff.

Generally, the Higurashi sound consists of good ol' folk with a slight bit of City Poppy keyboard anchored by Naomi Sakakibara's（榊原尚美）wonderfully breezy vocals. One of the songs I heard today was their 5th single from June 1977, "Orange Iro no Densha" (Orange Train). Written and composed by band vocalist and guitarist, Seiichi Takeda（武田清一）, the music comes off as that pleasant ride on that orange train (perhaps Tokyo's JR Chuo Line?) as it heads off to the countryside. It was just the tonic to listen to; I could imagine the scene as being sunny and spring-like. Compared to the slightly more City Pop of "Aki no Tobira", "Orange Iro no Densha" is definitely on the relaxing folk side of things.

The song was also a track on Higurashi's 1977 album, "Arifureta Dekigoto"（ありふれた出来事...Everyday Happenings）. Also, just for the record, the band lineup was Naomi Sakakibara (vocals and keyboards), Seiichi Takeda (vocals and guitar) and Yukio Nakamura (中村幸雄...vocals and guitar). In 1981, Sakakibara changed her name to Naomi Sugimura（杉村尚美）after which she released three singles as a solo singer (the band broke up in 1979). Some time later, she got married and retired from the industry.

No, it's not orange but
it gave a good tribute to
"Galaxy Express 999".