Rie Miyazawa with Takeshi Ito -- Kokoro kara Suki（心から好き）

 

I've been enjoying some of the old J-Dramas that JTM was kind enough to send over, and one of them is "Tokyo Elevator Girl"（東京エレベーターガール）starring Rie Miyazawa（宮沢りえ）. Although at the time of its broadcast in January 1992 on TBS, I'd been back in Toronto for over six months, even I heard of this show because of the immense popularity at the time of its star through TV, movies, that best-selling photo book of her, "Santa Fe", and then there would be her temporary engagement to the rising sumo superstar who had been known as Takahanada（貴花田）at the time.

Looking at the first episode, I was struck at how immediately melodramatic "Tokyo Elevator Girl" was right from the get-go. I'd actually expected it to be one of those light-hearted romantic comedies with that cheeky Miyazawa, but instead, she was quite subdued while surrounded by some sordidness in that department store her character worked in.

What was another striking thing was Miyazawa singing the theme song for "Tokyo Elevator Girl", "Kokoro kara Suki" (I Love You From My Heart). Now, the fact that the lead thespian is singing the theme song for their show in itself is not particularly surprising in the land of Japanese dramas, but "Kokoro kara Suki" isn't the usual aidoru-like ditty that I've expected from Miyazawa since tunes like "Dream Rush".

Instead, this Valentine's Day 1992 single by Miyazawa is one classy number done in the arrangement of City Pop in the 1990s with those certain keyboards in play. Although "Tokyo Elevator Girl" is actually set in a department store in the suburbs of Tokyo, "Kokoro kara Suki" is definitely set right in downtown within a more subdued and cooler atmosphere compared to the party-hearty paint-the-town-red sophisti-pop that was inhabiting the J-urban contemporary in the Bubble Era in the mid-to-late 1980s. The boom times might have been over for Japan but there was nothing said that pop music couldn't still have some of that polished class.

Miyazawa's vocals are still plenty light but they're also more self-assured and perhaps I can posit that the styling is such that I could even imagine Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）tackling "Kokoro kara Suki". I love the lushness of this chocolate fondue arrangement by keyboardist Tadashi Namba（難波正司）but along with Miyazawa, what makes the song even more velvety is the jazzy saxophone play by Takeshi Ito（伊東たけし）. It seems as if every site including J-Wiki that mentions the song also mentions the fact that Ito is involved, and deservedly so, because he's pretty much the other half of the duet with the singing lass.

Namba (who also produced the soundtrack to "Tokyo Elevator Girl") and Ito are both from the fusion group T-Square so I'm more than happy to include that band's name in the Labels, but accolades must be given to the composer Naoki Yamada（山田直毅）who also happens to be the husband of singer Hitomi Ishikawa（石川ひとみ）. The big surprise is the lyricist whose name is given as Kikuji but has another far more famous stage name: Beat Takeshi（ビートたけし）! Surprise No. 2 for me is that I only found out today that Miyazawa has been married to Go Morita（森田剛）of the Johnny's group V6 since 2018.