WISE (Tony's Show) -- Glass ni Yubiwa（グラスに指輪）

 

I'm not particularly huge on art but I have to admit that I'm an admirer of the illustrations of mangaka Seizo Watase（わたせせいぞう）. To add onto that, I've been buying his calendars for the past couple of years, and I've already gotten my 2023 edition ready to put up on the wall in a few weeks' time. He seems to be a purveyor of the romantic scene with beautiful and well-to-do couples in various milieus such as a beach or a well-apportioned home or a classy soiree. 

from eBay

I knew that Watase had created a very popular manga, "Heart Cocktail"（ハートカクテル）, which lasted for several years beginning from 1983. Never read it myself since romance isn't exactly my thing. My take on it was that it was all about the beautiful people in Japan doing beautiful things in beautiful cities and towns with a slight helping of ennui on the side. My other conclusion was that if my favourite genre of City Pop were created into a visual art form, then it would be done by Watase.

Well, then I started looking around to see if there were any connections between Watase and City Pop, aside from any album cover designs that he may have done back in the 1980s. It didn't take long before I hit pay dirt when I discovered on YouTube that in that decade of Japanese economic success and the Bubble Era, NTV had broadcast an anime adaptation of "Heart Cocktail" between 1986 and 1988. It was the network's first late-night anime in about 17 years and it was shown more as very brief 3-minute vignettes of love (past or present) in the metropolis to reflect the style of the original manga. In fact, according to J-Wiki's article on "Heart Cocktail", the show was given the subtitle of "A Story Lasting One Cigarette" (not surprisingly, the show's sponsor was Japan Tobacco).

One that I found above is titled "Cinderella Express 4 ~ Sepia Iro no Kamome"（シンデレラエクスプレス 4 「セピア色のカモメ」... Sepia Seagulls） so there was even a sub-series within the series, and if it's anything like Yumi Matsutoya's（松任谷由実）"Cinderella Express", it was all about the weekend romantic commute between Tokyo and Osaka back then. And with this fourth entry, the fellow remembers an old romance with Misako in which he had to do that exact Cinderella Express on the Bullet Train since he was working in Osaka at the time. Unfortunately, the relationship didn't last but one night coming off the Shinkansen, he notices a seagull pattern on a young girl's cardigan; the girl and her mother are going up the stairs as he is going down. His memory flashes to an identical pattern of seagulls on a drink coaster at his and Misako's old haunt, Melty. Then, he wonders whether the mother was indeed Misako. Ahhh...that succulent heartache!😘

It didn't take long for my question on Watase and City Pop to be answered. The song that was playing all throughout those three minutes is "Glass ni Yubiwa" (The Ring in the Glass) which sounds so City Pop or J-AOR that my heart grew three sizes today (wait, that's The Grinch!). I'd say that the languid and bittersweet tune was tailor-made for Omega Tribe（オメガトライブ）but it was indeed by a different act. It took a while but apparently the duo of Takumi Yamamoto（山本拓己）and Shingo Kanno（菅野真吾）either went by the name of WISE or Tony's Show. But hey, I'm good either way.

The two of them worked on the lyrics while Yamamoto tackled the music. Apparently to match with the number of volumes for the VHS tapes or LDs, there were also a number of soundtracks for "Heart Cocktail" the anime, and with "Glass no Yubiwa", it was placed onto "Heart Cocktail Vol. 3" whose tracks were taken care of by Tony's Show.

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I've known Thomas Gibson as Aaron Hotchner on "Criminal Minds", but dang, if there had ever been an American live-action version of "Heart Cocktail", he would have been on that Bullet Train! Ah, as a postscript, I managed to find another delectable tune from the show that I will write about promptly.