Ruiko Kurahashi -- Sayonara no Hohoemi（さよならの微笑）

 

For those who are celebrating the Easter long weekend, I hope you are having a good time. Perhaps some of you may be searching for a fish n' chip shop somewhere. 

I have a rather interesting song here to start off KKP on the final Saturday of March 2024. "Sayonara no Hohoemi" (The Goodbye Smile) is a track on Ruiko Kurahashi's（倉橋ルイ子）3rd album "Heartbreak Theater" from September 1982 and it's about as quintessentially Fashion Music as a Ruiko song can get. With all of the drama and existential uncertainty in the strings and the piano, this could have been inserted into the Japanese production of "Les Misérables" without anyone noticing. The singer herself sounds like she was about to succumb to some major tears.

"Sayonara no Hohoemi" was written and composed by Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）with the arrangement by Mitsuo Hagita（萩田光雄）. Now, the interesting part was that the following year, Ohnuki herself would release her 7th album "Signifie" with one of the tracks being a cover of Ruiko's song. However, it would have a different title: "Genwaku"（幻感....Fascination） and instead of the heartbreaking atmosphere in a French castle for "Sayonara no Hohoemi", Ohnuki's own version adopts her style of the time of appealingly quirky technopop Frenchness which might suggest a modern-day Jean Valjean trying to escape the intrepid Javert while on a moped in Paris. I'll be honest when I say that although I have listened to both songs in the past, I didn't make the connection between them until relatively recently...the arrangements are that different.