Keisuke Yamauchi -- Sarase Fuyu no Arashi（さらせ冬の嵐）

Tuesday's "Uta Kon"（うたコン）also featured enka singer Keisuke Yamauchi（山内惠介）and his latest (his 19th) single, "Sarase Fuyu no Arashi" from March 2018. The host and perhaps one other singer were making a few good-natured jokes at Yamauchi about why he had to sing something wintry during a blazing summer. The handsome singer could have been downright stoic around it and merely replied "Because it's in my contract!" but that would have gone down like an anvil so he countered by stating that it could actually help listeners cool down. And considering how brutally hot it's been in Japan, even for a Japanese summer (it topped 40 degrees Celsius in Gifu), any sort of relief from the heat would have been welcome.

Unfortunately the original music video at the top is only available in its truncated form and there don't seem to be any performance videos of Yamauchi, so we'll have to go with the karaoke video for the full version. Composed by Hideo Mizumori（水森英夫）and written by Goro Matsui（松井五郎）, "Sarase Fuyu no Arashi" weaves between bittersweet and hopeful as a man apparently goes out into a snowstorm demanding absolution from his woes (perhaps romantic). The single peaked at No.4 on Oricon and ended the year as the 71st-ranked single.

I wasn't quite sure about how to translate that word sarase in the title. Looking at jisho.org, there are quite a few definitions for the verb with the closest ones for the purpose of this song perhaps being expose or bleach. Glancing through Matsui's lyrics, perhaps I could go with cleanse or maybe even the more high-falutin' term absolve so that the title could be translated into "Cleanse Me, Winter Storm". Yamauchi pretty much dares nature to whip him dry since he ends each refrain with a defiance stating that he will not die from the blizzard. Perhaps "Sarase Fuyu no Arashi" is just the tonic at karaoke to sing off that stress.