Yuki Kato -- Café Noir de Hitoiki（Café Noirでひといき）

 

Not only is it Hump Day today but it's the final day of March 2021. Can't say that the news has been great for the last number of days here when it comes to COVID but I personally encountered something nice earlier this morning. A USB that I'd assumed lost forever containing many photos of my last few years in Japan suddenly popped up again after spending almost a decade in the far corner of a dusty drawer in one of the rooms in my home. Nice to go over the old pictures again.

One photo that was contained in the USB was the above. It's a cup of Viennese Coffee which I used to drink whenever I met a student at a small café in Funabashi for his weekly lesson. In Japanese, it's called wiener coffee so before I made its acquaintance all those years ago, I'd crazily assumed that it was the java with a sausage poked into it. I knew that the Japanese were more than capable of some gastronomically insane notions but with some relief, I came to realize that wiener coffee was actually Viennese Coffee, coffee with a good dollop of sweet whipped cream on top. 

For me, it was never a difficult decision on whether to stir in the cream with the coffee below or just eat my way through that top layer. I always went with the latter option. Nope, having Viennese Coffee every Friday wasn't a wise course of action in terms of any potential entry into Type 2 Diabetes, but dang was it tasty!

Instead of this being a re-discovery though as was the case with my formerly lost USB, this song was just a plain discovery last night. Titled "Café Noir de Hitoiki" (Taking a Break at Café Noir), I knew that I had to dig up a photo of a Japanese coffeehouse or a cup of java so what wonderful timing to find all those photos from over a decade ago again.

"Café Noir de Hitoiki" is a track from Yuki Kato's（加藤有紀）1983 debut mini-album "Love Potion", and there are a few articles on the singer-songwriter already on KKP. "Nazo wa To-ka-na-i-de"（謎はと・か・な・い・で）starts off the album and that is an interesting mix of New Wave and ska. Kato's "Café Noir de Hitoiki" is also a nice blend, but this one has more of the AOR and bossa nova and although I don't think it has enough of the styling to deserve a place in Labels for this song, I couldn't help but hear some Miharu Koshi（コシミハル）New Wave in there, especially in the first several seconds and that high-pitched background chorus later on. For that matter, the keyboard in use for this number also seems to predict some of the mellow music that Miki Imai（今井美樹）would interpret a few years down the line into the late 1980s. The overall effect is truly like taking a break at that Café Noir. While Kato wrote the lyrics, Yasuo Kosugi（小杉保夫）provided the music.

For the record, according to the website Idol.ne.jp, Kato released two singles and two albums including "Love Potion", all in 1983, followed by a BEST collection which was released in 2019. BTW, I couldn't help but also throw in a Royal Host parfait below. Don't lick the screen!😋