Saki Kubota -- Ennui（アンニュイ）

 

The last time I wrote about a Saki Kubota（久保田早紀）song was back in early 2020 for "Orange Air Mail Special"（オレンジ・エアメール・スペシャル）, her 4th single from 1981 and a track from her 4th album "Air Mail Special"（エアメール・スペシャル）from May of the same year. So, I guess that I'm coming back to that same release for another scintillating song.

The title "Ennui" automatically struck me as being something along those laconic Fashion Music lines represented by singers such as Ruiko Kurahashi（倉橋ルイ子）and early Chika Ueda（上田知華）. However, this "Ennui" isn't referring to a particular genre of music but to the feeling of a seen-it-all, done-it-all worldly woman who's once again on her own in the big city after the end of another romance, whirlwind or otherwise. The theme sounds just like the one for Hatsumi Shibata's（しばたはつみ）"Party is Over" which I wrote about earlier tonight.

Kubota wrote and composed "Ennui", and I do like Mitsuo Hagita's（萩田光雄）arrangement of the song which mixes in City Pop with a hint of Steely Dan horns. But at the same time, I think that there is some of that Henry Mancini-esque feeling, probably filtered through Keiko Maruyama's（丸山圭子）famous song "Douzo Kono Mama" (どうぞこのまま）. It is the melodic equivalent of that frequent nighttime journey that the woman in question can probably do while sleepwalking by this point in her life. She may be bored of the life but we're having fun with the music.