Yuko Fukushima -- Heian Eiga（平安栄華）

 

Happy Monday! Welcome to the penultimate full work week of 2024 as we head into the Holidays. 

Last week, I received an inquiry from a commenter about a singer that I had never heard of before. Yuko Fukushima（福島祐子）is listed on J-Wiki as a composer and arranger who's provided soundtracks for primarily TV programs and anime since the early 2000s. However, the commenter asked specifically on one album that she had released as a singer back in 1992 titled "Toki no Kioku"（時の記憶...Memories of Time）. In fact, her J-Wiki profile states that she had put out only two albums in the 1990s including this first one before apparently going on a route of just composing and arranging music.

The commenter first read about Fukushima and the album on a blog posting in which the author was fairly gushing about the ethereal style of the songs and how each track paints its own piece of Japanese beauty. As someone who had never heard of the singer until the last several days, I wasn't quite ready to tackle the entire album, but it was fortunate that one track was up on its own on YouTube so at least I could listen to that and give my impressions.

"Heian Eiga" (The Splendor of Heian) starts out with a bizarre and woozy guitar riff which ends up sounding like one of those flying cars from "Blade Runner". Then it gets into some avant-garde mixture of ancient court Japanese and contemporary musical sensibilities with Fukushima's Kate Bush-like or Akiko Yano-like（矢野顕子）vocals skating over the water like a mayfly. 

For those who may not be up on their Japanese history, the Heian era (794 AD - 1185) had been the final classical period before feudalism started making its inroads in the rule of the country. It was known as a peaceful time with the Imperial court at its apex and famous for its arts including poetry and literature. The era also saw the blossoming of true Japanese culture including the formation of the two syllabaries of hiragana and katakana and the move of the capital to what is now Kyoto (thank you, Wikipedia). To be honest, the traditional side of "Heian Eiga" sounds like what I would expect from the soundtrack of a J-Drama based in the Heian era.

Many thanks to the commenter for letting me know about Ms. Fukushima. Hopefully, I'll have a chance to listen to some more of the tracks.