Shoko Sawada/Iruka -- Seishun no Hikari to Kage（青春の光と影）

 

My previous article was a Reminiscings of Youth posting and yep, musically, those were some good times back in the 1970s and 1980s. However, along with the good came the bad and blue periods, and it was a matter of being able to avoid them or toughing them out to various degrees.

That's the impression I got from Shoko Sawada's（沢田聖子）wistful and folksy "Seishun no Hikari to Kage" (Light and Shadow of Youth) which was the title track from her April 1981 sophomore album. Also, the first song on the album, it was written and composed by folk and City Pop chanteuse Iruka（イルカ）while she was a university student and I guess that she and Sawada were good buddies (they were about the same age) as Iruka was kind enough to provide "Seishun no Hikari to Kage" as a gift to Sawada. 

The only thing at the time was that the song didn't have an official title. Iruka then opted to name it "Seishun no Hikari to Kage" after a song that she had a fondness for at the time, "Both Sides, Now" by Joni Mitchell whose Japanese title was "Seishun no Hikari to Kage". The song and the album also marked a drastic departure for Sawada in that up to 1981 during her first two years in show business, she'd been seen as a particularly talented aidoru. I will have to check those early years out.

Iruka would cover her own creation as a track on her September 1983 album "Loop Child". The wistfulness remains but the arrangement sounds as if the protagonist from the original version has grown up by a few years and become more seasoned in life.