Luca Mochizuki -- Oborozuki（朧月）

 

The idea of an aidoru becoming an enka singer is nothing new in the geinokai. Yoko Nagayama（長山洋子）made the transition in the 1990s and probably most people know her more as a singer of the traditional music than as a late 1980s teenybopper. There is also Misaki Iwasa（岩佐美咲）who came from AKB48 and then Sanae Jounouchi（城之内早苗）who tried her hand at enka while she was still with Onyanko Club（おニャン子クラブ）in the 1980s.

Therefore, probably no eyebrows were raised when a member of the now-defunct aidoru group Minzoku Happy Gumi（民族ハッピー組...Happy People Party）, Luca Mochizuki（望月琉叶）, had made her debut as an enka singer in 2020 before the group called it a day in 2023. Hailing from Yokohama, she set out in her attempts to become a solo singer from her days as a first-year high school student but during auditions, the suggestions kept on coming to become part of an aidoru group. However, some years later in 2018, while she was a university senior and after getting an offer to become an employee at an insurance company, she was scouted in trendy Daikanyama, Tokyo by the president of an entertainment company with the spiel that he was putting together an aidoru group that would bring enka to the world. Aware that her own mother had wanted to become an enka singer, she joined Enka Joshi Lupinus Gumi（演歌女子ルピナス組...Enka Ladies Lupinus Party）. The group would change its name to Minzoku Happy Gumi in the summer of 2019.

Mochizuki released her 5th single in June 2024, "Oborozuki" (Hazy Moon). Written by Koyomi Asa（麻こよみ）and composed by singer-songwriter Ryuzo Kimura（木村竜蔵）, the song is a bittersweet and dramatic story of a love that cannot come to fruition for whatever reason. For me, what has caught my ear is the singer's relatively lower and kobushi-laden vocals which can soar up to a mighty apex when needed.