Hitomi Tohyama -- 7 Course no Prologue（7 Course の Prologue）

 

My most recent Hitomi Penny Tohyama（当山ひとみ）article on "Heartbreak Calendar" was a little less than three weeks ago, and it's usually been my personal policy (and mine alone) to wait a month or so before writing about the same singer or band. However, I found the following.

J-DIGS, the official Nippon Columbia YouTube channel, put this video up about a month ago showing an interview by British radio DJ Nick Luscombe with Tohyama herself at music bar 45 in Shibuya, Tokyo. Of course, being the usual late comer to these things, probably a whole bunch of Penny fans and City Pop enthusiasts in general have already gone through this video a ton of times. Still, it's great to find this English-language interview with a singer from the City Pop genre when even encountering any local news reports on this genre in Japanese are still fairly rare or on the level of "WHY NON-JAPANESE PEOPLE?!". The only other recent interview that I recall that I believe was done in English with a City Pop Japanese artist was Junko Yagami（八神純子）in a newspaper.

Just call me Penny...or else!

Have a listen to Tohyama's vivacious talk on how she got into music and the albums that she recorded. One personal observation is that when I saw the cover for her debut May 1981 release "Just Call Me Penny", I'd assumed from that defiant way she was sitting on the chair and that hooded glare, she was about to have me for dinner if I didn't get her the smoke that she demanded. But according to the interview, she felt like a kitten among the lions.

The song here doesn't come from "Just Call Me Penny" but from her April 1987 album "One Scene". At first, I was wondering about what "7 Course no Prologue" (The 7-Course Prologue) meant; did it have something to do with a major dinner or something? According to Hikaru Kurashiki（倉敷光）and Penny's lyrics, it's about a woman poolside writing a final sad letter to a now-former lover with seven major statements including "What happened to our love?" and "I still love you" but a sudden squall has erased that seventh and final line, and probably the entire letter. 

However, those lyrics contrast with Yoshihiro Yonekura's（米倉良宏）melody which is pretty upbeat all things considering, so putting the squall aside, maybe there's some hope beyond the horizon with the lady moving on into the future. And after all, the title has the word "prologue", so this is merely the beginning of a new stage in life. Hopefully, that new stage will include a transistor radio which will give up-to-date weather forecasting.