Yukino Ichikawa -- Hana Wazurai（花わずらい）

 

I guess this enka would come under the thesis of "Love is such a fleeting thing". 

Well, in this case, l'amour could be compared to the relatively quick cycle of flowers budding, blooming and dying away. The title of Yukino Ichikawa's（市川由紀乃）latest is even called "Hana Wazurai". Looking up that second word on Jisho.org, I found out that wazurai is a fancier term for illness but I'm not sure whether anyone would want the translated title to be "Flower Illness" unless one was the most doctrinaire of botanists. Maybe "The Sweet Agony of Flowers" might be a bit more poetic if a bit florid since wazurai can also be defined as agony or worry.

But I digress. Ichikawa's 35th single from April 2023 is indeed a comparison of the brief and fragile nature of love, most likely from someone who's just finished another cycle of falling in and out of love. The drama has certainly been imbued into Kohei Miyuki's（幸耕平）melody and if this had been the old days, it probably could have actually been adapted into a film or TV drama. Goro Matsui（松井五郎）, who had once been a frequent collaborator on Anzen Chitai's（安全地帯）songs about forty years ago, was responsible for the lyrics.

The above video comes from King Records which produced "Hana Wazurai" and it's boasting that in the three months since it was posted onto YouTube, it's smashed the million-view barrier, and I guess for an enka song, that's a big thing. I probably wouldn't be surprised if Ichikawa got the invitation from NHK to come aboard the Kohaku Utagassen once more in a few months' time.