Yukako Hayase -- Sartre de Nemurenai （サルトルで眠れない）

Yukako Hayase（早瀬優香子）is another one of those folks that I stumbled across purely by accident via YouTube the other night. Judging from one record cover, I had initially thought that she was one of the hundreds of aidoru that blazed through the 80s, but then on reading her entry in J-Wiki, she was more into the French Pop side of things.

So I decided to try out her debut single from January 1986, "Sartre de Nemurenai" (Can't Sleep to Sartre). From the title right there, I gathered that she wasn't in the aidoru section of kayo kyoku. And yet, the lyricist was Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）, the creator of aidoru supergroups Onyanko Club and AKB48, while Kenji Omura（大村憲司）took care of the music. Speaking of which, I'm not quite sure what French Pop of the 80s sounded like, but Omura wove quite the saucy somewhat technopoppy melody for Hayase for which the singer was more than happy to complement with her kittenish vocals as she sang about suggesting taking a break from studying to work in some kissy face with the beau. Ooh la la, indeed. To a small extent, she reminded me of Miharu Koshi（コシミハル）when she had brought her own mix of French & technopop to re-invent her musical image, although I think Hayase was more poppier.

Hayase was born in Tokyo in 1967, and according to J-Wiki, although she had a small role in a 1979 drama, she basically started her career in acting in the mid-80s before twinning that with singing the following year. As a singer, she released 8 singles and 7 albums. In the 90s, she started doing that slow fadeout from show business to the point that rumours of death and disappearance started circulating before she disproved those by writing some comments to the contrary on a fan site.

Ueno Museum