Luca Mochizuki -- Wagamama（わがまま）

 

Wikimedia Commons

via MaedaAkihiko

If you had predicted thirty years ago that musician, producer and songwriter Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉） would make an enka song, I would have searched for that bottle of alcohol and swiped it away from you declaring "That's enough Absinthe of Malice for you!". I could never have imagined the guy behind what I've called the Komuro Steamroller of the mid-1990s, responsible for the huge techno-dance-pop and the hit careers of acts including trf, Tomomi Kahala（華原朋美）and globe, as someone who would ever come up with a song from the traditional Japanese genres of either enka or Mood Kayo.

But miracles do happen. And it did here. I read reports from one of my Twitter friends and then the Mixi news feed that Komuro had written and composed an enka song for the silken-voiced Luca Mochizuki（望月琉叶）, whom I first posted about a year ago with her "Oborozuki"（朧月）. Titled "Wagamama" (Selfish), the two of them worked together to describe a story of one woman who is willing to throw everything away and jump on a train to join her beloved and breathe the air he breathes. Yes, perhaps I'm being a bit florid here, but listening to "Wagamama", I hadn't initially heard any of the old Komuro melodic tropes but then again, there is something in the process going from verse to chorus where I've heard something familiar from the 1990s among the acts that I mentioned above.

In any case, "Wagamama" was just released in the last week and it's apparently already hit No. 1 on the enka/kayo charts of Oricon. Many congratulations to Komuro and Mochizuki. 

Just couldn't resist, could he?