Higurashi -- Tabi no Douwa（旅の童話）

 

It was a dozen years ago, during Year One of "Kayo Kyoku Plus", when I delightedly wrote about my re-discovery of folk/New Music group Higurashi's（日暮し）"Aki no Tobira"（秋の扉）, a song which I hadn't been able to identify on my crackling radio recording of it on "Sounds of Japan" for around thirty years. It still remains one of my favourites among autumn kayo and there are plenty of those tunes in the Great Japanese Songbook because apparently the Japanese have loved to create and sing about the death of romance in the cooler season.

"Aki no Tobira" was Higurashi's 8th and penultimate single released in September 1978. The B-side is "Tabi no Douwa" (A Fairy Tale for a Trip) which was created from a collaboration between Higurashi co-vocalist and guitarist Seiichi Takeda（武田清一）and arranger Katsu Hoshi（星勝）as was the case for the A-side (unfortunately back then being so early in the blog's history, I apparently hadn't made it a custom to mention songwriters in the first few months of KKP😓).

Compared to the feeling of standing on a hill and letting the breeze flow around me when I listen to "Aki no Tobira", "Tabi no Douwa" is very much more of a moving tune (still lots of breeziness though); just get in the car and drive well into the countryside or along the seashore. At first, when I read the title for the song, I assumed that it was going to be some tenderhearted ballad for children since "douwa" can also mean "children's story". However, Takeda's lyrics don't mention any moppets at all, and it's really about someone driving alone wishing that a now-absent passenger seat was still occupied by that special someone but for reasons unknown, the person will no longer be there. Still, the feeling is that time and the driver are moving on in all aspects of the word.