Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi -- Rokunamon ja ne（ろくなもんじゃねえ）

 

When I was teaching at an Urayasu juku during my later years in Ichikawa, I found out that one of my students ran a small restaurant with her husband literally just around the corner from the juku. So, since I had a few hours on Friday night before I had to teach, I decided to give the restaurant a shot. I ordered their Chicken Sauté and fell in love with it immediately, especially with the rich sauce and bottomless plates of rice. I ended up going to that place every couple of weeks and usually I ordered that Chicken Sauté, much to my student's delight. They had lots of other fine examples of comfort food there, too.

Outside of his songs' inclusion in Reminiscings of Youth articles, it's been over four years since I featured singer-songwriter and actor Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi（長渕剛）, and I have this song which has been familiar to me for an even longer period of time. His 16th single from May 1987, "Rokunamon ja ne" (Ain't Good), was a popular request at karaoke in my later years at those university outings to Kuri, the local karaoke bar in downtown Toronto. Though at the time, I couldn't remember the title of the song, I knew it because of the opening line "Pi, pi, pi, pi, pi, pi..." which was a bit of onomatopoeia to get things going.

Listening to it again after so long, "Rokunamon ja ne" is a lot softer than I had remembered it to be. I had thought it was one of Nagabuchi's uptempo rockers, but it actually sounds and has been categorized as a folk tune (although I'm still putting in the J-Rock label since I still think that there are elements of that genre in there, too). Written and composed by the singer, it's an acoustic guitar-and-piano dominant number about expressing those years of depression and anguish in adolescence that have bubbled up to the surface.

"Rokunamon ja ne" was often a hit at the bar so I could only imagine what it has been like at concerts such as the one featured above. It peaked at No. 3 on Oricon and is a track on Nagabuchi's 10th studio album "License" from August 1987. The album spent two weeks at No. 1 and won Best Album honours at that year's Japan Record Awards.

The song was also used as the theme song for the 1987 TBS family drama "Oyako Zig Zag"（親子ジグザグ...Parent and Child Zig Zag） which starred Nagabuchi as the owner of a small Tokyo diner serving comfort food (which is why I started with that first paragraph) and having to do deal with some complicated family issues. From what I've seen of some scenes, there are plenty of punches thrown which seem to be par for the course for a Nagabuchi drama.