Mariko Takahashi -- Hitoaruki (Part 2)（ひとあるき）

 

Yesterday, I posted Part 1 covering chanteuse Mariko Takahashi's（高橋真梨子）March 1979 debut album "Hitoaruki" (Walking Alone) and so I'm completing it with Part 2 tonight. It's been a nice trip through the genres as the Hiroshima Prefecture-born singer exercises her wonderful chops for the first time as a solo singer.

Seeing that there were a total of ten tracks on the original LP, I'm assuming that Track 6 "Oide Summer Holiday"（おいでサマー・ホリディ）which I have already covered in its own separate article (you can click the link in Part 1) starts off Side B. So we go onto Track 7, "Otozure"（訪れ...The Visit） which is a short but very sweet and slightly woozy and boozy bossa nova-inflected song about a visit by a lover which, let's say, is a bit bigger than a pleasant arrival for tea and cake (maybe for breakfast, perhaps😎). Yasuhiro Kido（木戸やすひろ）was responsible for the melody while the lyricist could be a man or a woman named Aki Fukunaga or Kumi Fukunaga（福永史）. According to Jisho.org, the kanji for that first name could be read in different ways.

The next track is "Futari no Monogatari"（二人の物語...Story of Two）, a bittersweet tale of a woman walking alone in the rain, being reminded when it used to be the two of them taking their walks before fate intervened and they split up. Takahashi has also been one of those few singers in Japanese pop music that also reveled in doing the occasional song with that country ballad lilt, and this is one of them. It doesn't always stay maudlin though as the arrangement by Shinichi Tanabe（田辺信一）takes things into something brighter and hopeful in the chorus. "Futari no Monogatari" was written and composed by Kuni Kawauchi（クニ河内）who had created "My Dream" from Part 1.

Takahashi has always had a deep and rich voice and she goes slightly even deeper here as she tackles Track 9, the melancholy "Yoru no Kao"（夜の顔...Face of the Night）. Written by Rei Tsushima（津島玲）and composed by Kiyoshi Hasegawa（長谷川きよし）, the song about what I think is a lady in the mizu shobai industry going about her evening business with a sense of resignation and necessity comes off in the arrangement as being dramatic to the point of being almost chanson. That intro also had me wondering whether this was going to be a Fashion Music tune but the arrangement veers things back into adult contemporary and perhaps a bit of classical pop.

From the heaviness of the previous song, we come to the final track for "Hitoaruki", "Chiisana Watashi"（小さなわたし...Little Me）. It's a love ballad composed by City Pop and jazz songsmith Kingo Hamada（濱田金吾）, and I've found the collaborations between Takahashi and Hamada to be some wonderfully tenderhearted songs such as the one they would do later, "Jazz Singer". Both Takahashi and the aforementioned Fukunaga for "Otozure" worked on the lyrics about a woman who feels warm, safe and beloved in her partner's embrace. The ballad also feels like a lullaby of sorts and I recall that at least a few of Takahashi's other albums ended in the same manner as if she knew that fans would listen to them later into the wee hours of the night so that the final track would help to send them off to la-la land.

In any case, "Hitoaruki" is an album that Takahashi fans probably already have as a must-own, but for those who are starting their exploration into the Japanese pop music of yore that doesn't involve aidoru or enka, I can recommend this one as an album for those who could enjoy the adult contemporary with the foray into the romantic.

As a PS, I have to say that it was listening to "Chiisana Watashi" that prompted me to talk about the entire album. I had originally planned to just write about that final track from 1979 and then also introduce Takahashi's own cover of the ballad in her most recent album of covers, "Mari Covers" from June 2019. The newer version has been fortified with some bossa nova.