Hitomi Aki/Megumi Takanashi -- Aishuu Boy（哀愁BOY）

 

I've been hearing about the anime version of "Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san"（イジらないで、長瀞さん... Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro） for some months, and now that it's running for some weeks now, I've caught some scenes on YouTube. Still not totally sold on it quite yet so I guess that I will wait until its run is over and then decide whether to get my own copy of the series.

Not that this 1980 song has any direct connection with "Nagatoro-san" but reading the lyrics for "Aishuu Boy" (Melancholy Boy), I can't help but feel whether they were giving a premonition of what would become the original manga many years later. Singer-songwriter Megumi Takanashi（高梨めぐみ）created the words and music for this cute song about a young girl secretly pining for this rather introverted fellow in school for aidoru Hitomi Aki（秋ひとみ）as her 6th and penultimate single in March of that year. 

The Osaka-born singer's career behind the mike only lasted a couple of years with those seven singles and two albums between 1978 and 1980. Aki also had a brief time as a TV personality but after deciding that she wanted to take a break from the geinokai in 1982, she apparently decided not to return.

Takanashi herself did a cover of her own song with only a slightly different arrangement as a track on her lone 1980 album "Miss Tearful". Both versions are very light and bouncy and cheerful with the observation on Takanashi's version that the singer sounds a little like Meiko Nakahara（中原めいこ）whom I wrote about only yesterday.

Hailing from Ibaraki Prefecture, Takanashi first won an award at the inaugural EMI Express Singer-Songwriters' Audition in 1978 and had also won a couple of grand prizes at the Yamaha Popular Song Contests in the Ibaraki and Chiba regional competitions in that year and earlier in 1976. She released a couple of singles starting in 1979 and then that lone album the following year. She also provided songs for other singers such as Aki. After a hiatus of some length, she returned to the music scene from 2001 under the name of forty winks with three albums.