Arisa Mizuki -- Too Shy Shy Boy!

 

When it comes to Arisa Mizuki's（観月ありさ）singles, the one song that I will always remember and cherish is her 1991 debut, "Densetsu no Shojo" （伝説の少女）which was written and composed by Ami Ozaki（尾崎亜美）. It was simply a finely crafted pop song for me with those luscious strings attached. I first found out about the song through a commercial that Mizuki had also appeared in touting the taste of Kirin's soda Chasse.

It looks like Mizuki was back on the Chasse file again the following year although this time, her song was markedly different although also created by a pretty famous songwriter.

I remember first hearing her 4th single "Too Shy Shy Boy!" from May 1992 when Mizuki showed up on some music program and then I grimaced quite noticeably. No, I wasn't all that impressed with her performance but as an English teacher, I was surprisingly sanguine about letting the weirdness in that title go. Maybe I was glugging down a glass of Chasse.

Years later, I actually gave it another go, this time with the actual recorded version and it came across better since by that point, I had become accustomed to the synth-y Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）sound, and indeed it was him behind words and music. "Too Shy Shy Boy!" was released just before Komuro had his heyday in the mid-1990s with all of his hit songs for acts like Namie Amuro（安室奈美恵）and globe. According to an October 1993 article in the magazine "FM STATION" via the J-Wiki article on the song, Mizuki herself had admitted that she was having some initial problems getting a handle on how to sing it so the songwriter came over to the studio and guided her on keyboards. Through an in-house magazine at Sony, Komuro stated that if he had created "Too Shy Shy Boy!" during his TM Network's days in the late 1980s, this would have been one of their tunes.

Hmmm...OK. Not sure if this had been the performance that had initially turned me off of Komuro-led Mizuki but I think he could have let go of a lot of those vocal effects. In any case, "Too Shy Shy Boy!" peaked at No. 4 on Oricon and ended up as the No. 54 single of the year. This would become Mizuki's biggest hit, selling around 360,000 copies, and was included as a remix version on her 2nd album "Shake Your Body For Me" from October that year. It hit No. 6 on the album charts.