The above is a pretty dish of sashimi that I had with a couple of friends at a fairly fancy restaurant called Sazanka somewhere between Kameido and Shin-Koiwa Stations in Tokyo in September 2009. Good food and unfortunately, that's the only photographic evidence that I currently possess of ever being in the shitamachi neighbourhood. But then again, I couldn't have envisaged writing an article about a song in the area in my own music blog 15 years ago.
I never did a deep dive in Kameido or Shin-Koiwa all that much during my time in Tokyo. Aside from that visit to Sazanka, I think I went there perhaps one more time to meet up with another group at a local izakaya along the train tracks, but my impression was that it was an old-fashioned area suffused with the aroma of Showa. One of my students-turned-friends currently lives in the latter neighbourhood. Basically though the area was one that I mostly bypassed on the Sobu Line heading to Chiba Prefecture.
Much like I did with the retro duo Emi & Gel（エミとゲル）the other day, I had assumed that singer Yoko Nagisa（渚ようこ）was active during the late 1960s and early 1970s just from listening to her "Shin-Koiwa kara Kameido e" (From Shin-Koiwa to Kameido) and seeing that sad face above where Nagisa looked like she belonged in a fashion magazine from the aforementioned time period. Well, I was wrong once again.
The Yamagata Prefecture-born Nagisa actually made her debut in 1994 and for over twenty years, she specialized in the old-school kayo kyoku. In fact, "Shin-Koiwa kara Kameido e" is from her final album "Nagisa Strut"（渚ストラット）from September 2016. Even so, this particular song sounds like a mix of Mood Kayo and the guitar-screeching rock side of Group Sounds of the 1960s as Nagisa sings about a woman's turbulent young life in the titular neighbourhood. Lyricist Haruo Yamaguchi（山口晴男） and composer Masao Minakami（水上雅夫）were responsible for the creation of the song which really grabs that old kayo style just so. There's also something about those lyrics and the singer's delivery that reminds me of Keiko Fuji（藤圭子）and her songs of a downtrodden life in the big bad city, but Nagisa has a slightly brighter and brassier sound.
All in all, Nagisa released 17 albums and 7 singles between 1996 and 2018 which included some collaborations between her and the Crazy Ken Band (クレイジーケンバンド) . Even during that time, she was able to open her own drinking establishment, Nagisa（汀）, in Shinjuku's famed bar-filled Golden Gai in 2003. In September 2018, though, after appearing in a 20th anniversary concert for the Crazy Ken Band, she fell ill and then passed away from heart failure.
Since, Yoko Nagisa made her debut in early in the Heisei period it seem clear she grew up in the showa period. Maybe she was exposed to a lot genres from the Showa period.
ReplyDeleteAlthough her birth date and real name were never made clear, yeah, I would say that Nagisa had plenty of time to absorb the music of the Showa era.
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