Hanako Asada -- Sayonara, DANCE（さよなら、ＤＡＮＣＥ）

 

Encountering this song title here has had me remembering a 2003 book called "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss who was not very happy about how punctuation was being mistreated. 

This isn't to say that Hanako Asada's（麻田華子）"Sayonara, DANCE" is the punctuation grenade that Truss was warning about, but I initially wondered what the title was saying. Was it a goodbye to character actor Charles Dance? Was it meant to be a farewell to dancing or was it a goodbye two-step with the comma mistakenly placed in between the two words?

OK, enough with the snarkiness. From the lyrics by Kazuko Kobayashi（小林和子）, "Sayonara, DANCE" was most likely meant to be a short two-item list describing an unhappy lass' night with her saying goodbye to a now erstwhile boyfriend and then hitting the nearest disco to get rid of her negative feelings with little success. Mind you, the melody by Hideya Nakazaki（中崎英也）and arrangement by Nobuyuki Shimizu（清水信之）are plenty aidoru perky and reflective of the time period. "Sayonara, DANCE" was released as Asada's 4th single in February 1989. The song failed to score anywhere on the Oricon Top 100 and didn't appear on either of her two original albums but it finally showed up on her February 2004 BEST compilation "Asada Hanako Collection"（麻田華子 コレクション）. 

As I mentioned in my first article regarding Asada, "Doubt!", she just had the five singles and two albums before calling it a singing career.