Nobue Kawana - のぶえの海 (Nobue's Sea)

Oh brother, grab your tissues.

Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Nobue Kawana(河名伸江). Born on June 21, 1954, Nobue developed a passion for music early in life. She began studying violin in kindergarten, attended

Todoroki Elementary School, and later went to Higashi-Fukasawa Junior High School. She was a competitive swimmer, too. In 1970, she entered Jissen Girls’ High School, but soon became ill and spent the following years going back and forth between the hospital and her room.

Even then, she kept making music. Nobue spent long stretches recording songs onto cassette tapes and playing with her friends. She wrote about the sea, love, illness, and whatever else was on her mind. She died on June 21, 1974, her twentieth birthday.

While she was taken from us too soon, thanks to some faithful friends, Keiko Saitou & Ryohei Suzuki, they helped gather the songs she had recorded into のぶえの海 (Nobue no Umi, or Nobue’s Sea), a privately made album released in 1975, made as a parting gift for the people who knew her. Branco Label gave the record a wider audience with a CD reissue in 2013, followed by a vinyl reissue in 2023.

Listening to Nobue’s Sea feels like watching someone’s childhood home videos. Ryohei’s narration appears between some of the songs, sharing memories of Nobue and her love of the ocean. The recordings have an amateur quality, but there’s an innocence to them that makes them endearing and deeply melancholy. Often, it’s just Nobue singing with a guitar and a friend beside her. It melts your heart really.

The opening song, “Hajimete no Asa,” sets the tone for the whole album. There’s a purity in her voice that draws you in immediately. But the song that always brings me to tears is “Anata wa Umi” (“You Are the Sea”). It’s one of the most sorrowful piano songs I’ve ever heard. I remember hearing it before I knew Nobue’s story, and somehow I already felt like I was mourning someone.

You can't really review this record... I mean, technically you can, but assigning a verdict to something this personal feels dirty. The recordings aren’t polished studio productions, yet Nobue’s gift for songwriting still shines through. The tape hiss gives the album an almost ghostly atmosphere, as though her songs have traveled to us from another room and another time. I don’t mean that insensitively. It’s part of what makes the music feel so intimate.

Listening it also reminds me that tomorrow is not promised. I've heard plenty of stories about artists dying before they get to see their work fully realized. For me this one is the most tragic, as it's someone so young. I'll admit it puts a fear in my hear that I might die before completing my own creative endeavors. Yet, at the same time, I feel encouraged to not live in fear and to simply create to the best of my ability while I'm still here, in spite of my own struggles. 

There isn’t much reliable information about Nobue herself. But thanks to the liner notes and some helpful Discogs comments, we can get a glimpse of her character by the people who knew her best.

I can’t do Nobue’s Sea justice with words. But maybe her friend can.

Keiko Saitou, recounts:

“I met her first when I was 16. I would go over to her house all the time to sing and record music onto cassette tapes. She had perfect pitch and could play any instrument she touched- violin, guitar, and composition as well. I would harmonize with her, and play piano, as well as help with lyrics.

My parents greatly disapproved of our friendship, they would scold me for not applying my every second to my studies. But I still spent much of my time practicing my abilities in songwriting and going over to her house to play.

She was fashionable and influential to her friends in a positive sense. Despite a sickness that had wrecked her health since early teenhood.

On her 19th birthday, in 1974, she passed away.

I independently attempted to have a physical LP of her music released, and in 1975, it was done. With the help of a male mutual friend who told her life story in segments sandwiched between the tracks. These copies were given to our friend group as almost a parting gift for us all.

I still think about how every day, after school, I would visit her in her room as she was always sick in bed because of the untreatable cancer. We sang of love, sickness, and a longing for the sea.”