Kazuhito Murata -- Owaranai Natsu（終わらない夏）

 

Now that we're less than a week before official Summer comes gliding in, I guess that I can earnestly throw in some of those summer kayo. It is looking really nice out in my city today.

YouTuber Peter Lendom uploaded this video on one Canadian's love odyssey with the Shonan area west of Tokyo back in 2015 and it still may very well have folks swooning about the surfer dude's life along the coast. In 2014, I walked along the stretch of Kanagawa Prefecture shoreline with a couple of friends and saw a lot of surfers and their boards on the beach. Mind you, it was October but it still looked pretty darn summery although the temperatures were about ten degrees lower by that point.

This must have been the setting that the late Kazuhito Murata（村田和人）had been envisioning when he composed the track "Owaranai Natsu" (The Neverending Summer), a track on his 1982 debut album "Mata Ashita"（また明日...See You Tomorrow） when it was released on the first day of summer. Written by Yoshihiko Ando（安藤芳彦）and arranged by Shigeru Suzuki（鈴木茂）, Murata's vocals are just so enticing backed by a melody that seems to be a mixture of some of those early Resort Pop sounds and precursor music to the sunny song stylings of TUBE which was a few years away from making their debut as a summertime band.

Ando's lyrics talk about a longtime surfing resident who's happily anchored in his life along the coast with his memories of a beautiful woman who used to visit the beach. He also seems to be a pro that has welcomed and said goodbye to a lot of the city crowd who keep coming back to his domain for some summery R&R. Murata sadly left this mortal coil in 2016 but I'd like to think that in spirit, he keeps an eye on the folks looking to take five and hang ten.