Kouki Kotokaze/Hibari Misora -- Mawari Michi（まわり道）

 

Earlier this afternoon, my father was interested in watching some of his old karaoke videos on the telly. Yep, I did say videos...VHS, in fact. The old-school medium. There were some sold by the Teichiku corporation back in the day which usually contained four karaoke videos a tape.

One of the videos contained a tune titled "Mawari Michi" (Detour). It was definitely an enka tune in sound but I'd never heard it before, and to my surprise, it was originally recorded by sumo wrestler Kotokaze who had been in the ring between 1971 and 1985. He now goes by the name Kouki Kotokaze（琴風豪規） (though his birthname was Koichi Nakayama) after retiring from the sport earlier in May following many years as the stablemaster Oguruma（尾車）.

Kotokaze isn't the first sumo rikishi to make it onto the pages of "Kayo Kyoku Plus". That honour goes to Daishiro Masuiyama（増井山大志郎）when I wrote about his 2013 "Yuko no O-Mise"（夕子のお店）more than a decade ago. However, Kotokaze had hit the microphone and the recording booth a few decades earlier when he cut his first record with "Mawari Michi" in October 1982 while he was still active as a wrestler.

He definitely had some big guns helping out in the creation of "Mawari Michi", a song about admiring that young lady from afar (although the Teichiku karaoke video plainly showed an obviously successful couple walking that titular short cut). Lyricist Rei Nakanishi（なかにし礼）provided the words while Takashi Miki（三木たかし）took care of the stately music. On the Oricon chart, "Mawari Michi" did fairly well as it hit No. 34 on the weeklies, ending up as the No. 51 single for 1983 and selling half a million records.

It says something about a kayo kyoku when the Queen of Kayo Kyoku herself, Hibari Misora（美空ひばり）, was willing to cover it, and in fact, she covered "Mawari Michi" which was included on "Cover Song Collection ~ Hibari Enka wo Utau"（カバーソング コレクション～ひばり演歌をうたう...Hibari Sings Enka） from 2008. Obviously, because Misora passed away all the way back in 1989, she had recorded the song much earlier; I was able to find an image of one CD containing her version of "Mawari Michi" which showed the year 1988, so I'll go with that. Her take is a more playful tune.

This is a karaoke version of the song but not the one that I viewed earlier today.