Maki Nomiya -- Onna Tomodachi（女ともだち）

 

The Divine Maki Nomiya（野宮真貴）...I'll always see her as the figure of Shibuya-kei and cool 60s fashion prancing around the streets of Paris and New York and Tokyo thanks to her time as the third and most prominent vocalist of Pizzicato Five. However, there had been a time when Nomiya was in a different type of music altogether before she joined P5 in the 1990s. I've already written a bit about that through her time with the New Wave band, Portable Rock, in the 1980s.

According to a feature in a December 2019 issue of the magazine "Showa 40-Nen Otoko"（昭和40年男...1960s Man）, when she was in her pre-teen years, Nomiya had begun listening to Western music artists such as The Carpenters, Sergio Mendes and Michel Polnareff before getting into glam rock and then hard rock as a high schooler. She even helped set up a rock band but realized that her voice wasn't really suited for hard rock but then she got into New Wave and technopop as she graduated from high school, becoming an admirer of Plastics' Chica Sato. To be honest, I had always thought that there were some similarities in looks between the two.

Following her graduation from technical school and a failed attempt at starting up a New Wave band, Nomiya became an employee at a computer company and was a frequent customer at a New Wave-themed coffee house in Shibuya, Nylon 100%. Don't bother going there to find it. It closed down in 1986. Anyways, she was scouted into the music industry, first becoming a junior member of the band Halmens, and then in 1981 at the age of 21, she got to record and release her very first solo single, "Onna Tomodachi" (Female Friend).

Written by Akira Ito（伊藤アキラ）and composed by Keiichi Suzuki（鈴木慶一）, the jaunty "Onna Tomodachi" is one adorable New Wave and technopop tune. With Nomiya's smooth and high vocals, I could say that the song could have belonged to the techno aidoru category. The main chorus sounds like an excerpt from "The Nutcracker Suite" and Ito's lyrics are pretty ironic in that Nomiya sings herself as a pretentious yet stylish ojou-san (although her delivery is not an affected one at all) addressing the beliefs by someone, presumably from the lower class, that they could actually be friends on an equal footing. If I'm not mistaken, Nomiya ended up appearing as that sort of character when she became the Queen of Shibuya-kei a decade later. 

I don't know how the single did on the charts but it was the launching track for Nomiya's debut album "Pink no Kokoro"（ピンクの心...Pink Heart） which was also released in 1981. Commenter YMOfan04 let me know about this last night which sparked this article, so many thanks to her.