Minayo Watanabe -- Yuki no Kaerimichi（雪の帰り道）

 

Well, a couple of days after the Kanto got dumped by several centimetres of snow including eight centimetres in Tokyo, it appears that it's all pretty disappeared in the megalopolis at least. If anything, snow in Tokyo is polite...never overstays its welcome. It doesn't linger like in Toronto where the snow gradually devolves into a black mass of something by late March.

I was watching an excerpt from "Yuyake Nyan Nyan"（夕やけニャンニャン）, the flagship show for the massive aidoru group Onyanko Club（おニャン子クラブ）in the 1980s when I caught one of the club, Minayo Watanabe（渡辺美奈代）, Member No. 29, singing her second single "Yuki no Kaerimichi" (Snowy Way Home). Watanabe's first appearance on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" was for her bubbly April 1987 4th single "PINK no CHAO" which I posted all the way back in September 2015.

Well, I figure that I was going to have to add to the Minayo file, thus comes "Yuki no Kaerimichi" which first hit the music store shelves in October 1986. The J-Wiki article on the song seemed to be a bit critical by saying something along the lines of "In stark contrast to her previous work (her first single), which had a fresh, debut-like feel to it, the second release is a melancholy minor-toned song with a shuffle beat". That might be the case but I have had no problems with "Yuki no Kaerimichi", as written by Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康） and composed by Tsugutoshi Goto（後藤次利）, because it has that certain old jazzy feel that I've enjoyed in any kind of music, even including a clarinet solo. But I'd like to check out that first single of hers as well now. The lyrics are definitely a downer as a woman finds out abruptly that her boyfriend hasn't been faithful to her and she takes that very lonely walk home in the wintry weather.

"Yuki no Kaerimichi" hit No. 1 on the charts and it finished the year as the 70th-ranked single for 1986. The single was also included on Watanabe's debut album "Alfalfa"（アルファルファ）which was released in November of that year. The LP reached No. 2 on the album charts and ended 1987 as the 31st-ranked album.