Aya Katsuragi -- Nijuu-ichi Banme no Kanashimi（21番目の悲しみ）

 

Thanks to the YouTube channel Nameless Songs, I've been able to discover songs by the more obscure singers of all stripes from Japan. If you have a chance, head over there and explore!

I have a feeling that a lot of those selections consist of aidoru from the 1970s and especially the 1980s because the revolving door of teenybopper singers spun so hard that it ended up dislocating itself from its central axis. And here today, I have Aya Katsuragi（桂木文）from Nagoya who had a fairly long run in the geinokai between 1978 and the early 2000s according to her J-Wiki profile, much of it probably due to her time as an actress.

And indeed, her debut in show business happened due to her selection out of 40,000 applicants as Hiromi Go's（郷ひろみ）love interest in the late 1970s in his show "Muu Ichizoku"（ムー一族...The Muu Family）. Katsuragi also had a pretty brief time in the recording booth as an aidoru between 1978 and 1982. She released three singles in the late 1970s with a lone album coming out in November 1982, "Hitoribocchi no Concerto"（ひとりぼっちのコンチェルト...A Concerto All Alone）.

One track from the album is "Nijuu-ichi Banme no Kanashimi" (Lonely for the 21st Time) which was composed by Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）and written by Hiroko Asano（浅野裕子）. The interesting part, aside from the fact that Ohnuki came up with the moderately melancholy melody, is that no fewer than four people participated in its arrangement including Nobuyuki Shimizu（清水信之）. I'm not sure if that is a good sign or not since I've often heard that if the number of writers on a certain TV episode reads like a long Xmas wish list, then it was probably a troubled assignment. Listening to the nearly-four-minute song feels like a trip through different nations with the first port-of-call being a particularly refined aidoru tune and the final one ending up as a truly exotic technopop march of some majesty. However, through it all, I found Katsuragi's vocals to be quite non-aidoru and pure of heart, and even somewhat similar to those of Ohnuki herself.

From last.fm