Yaya Auga -- Close to the night

 

Last week, I was able to dig up a music memory from the late 1990s through the Komuro Boom when I re-discovered Leika Miku's（未来玲可）"Umi to Anata no Monogatari"（海とあなたの物語）.

Actually, this video was in the backlog for much longer than the Miku single although I did hear of the name Yaya Auga（大賀埜々）. Auga's birth name is Mikako Motoyama（本山美香子）and she hails from Sapporo in Hokkaido, and her career in entertainment first began as a model from the early 1990s when she was in her mid-teens.

However from 1996, she started the next phase in her career through singing (and the adoption of a stage name, Yaya Auga), and Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）of avex trax produced her debut single "Close to the night" which was released in September of that year. Created by both Komuro and his old bandmate from TM Network, Naoto Kine（木根尚登）, that Komuro sound is in there. As well, the vocal style of Auga is quite similar to that of the other members of the Komuro Family such as the aforementioned Miku, Tomomi Kahala（華原朋美）and tohko.

From about 2000, Auga made another switch and headed into acting. During her relatively brief stint as a singer, she left 6 singles and 1 album, "Orange" which came out in March 1998.