In the past several months, I've become a fan of watching YouTube videos of "The Graham Norton Show" especially since he allows his guests to get nicely sloshed in the Green Room and on stage so that they can be a lot more relaxed and voluble. I've especially loved that one segment in which some of the "Avengers" cast came on and discussed weird phobias.
But then in the search for more gems on the show, I encountered this one video which had Jennifer Connelly, who played Spiderman's suit AI, Karen (Instant Kill, anyone?) in "Spiderman: Homecoming" just for that continued Marvel connection, as a guest (and with other Marvel-connected thespians Chris Pratt and Elizabeth Banks). There, I found out that Connelly had actually released a single in Japan when she was a teen in the 1980s. In fact, according to the JASRAC database, she released three singles!
But then, listening to the music and Connelly's delivery of Hideyo Hashimoto's（橋本日出世）words, there was something rather familiar about the entire song. Her halting and measured singing along with the soft string-led and slightly wondrous arrangement started knocking on my memory. After looking up JASRAC on who actually composed "Ai no Monologue", it was none other than singer-songwriter Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）!
Ohnuki may be getting a lot of love for her City Pop classic "4 AM" from the late 1970s but from around the mid-1980s, I think that she was becoming known by her fans for music similar to the one that she provided for Connelly's song: something reminiscent of a magical manor deep in the English countryside. Plus, Ohnuki herself was also singing in that same slow and measured manner. Although host Norton proclaimed that "Ai no Monologue" was a No. 1 hit in Japan, I couldn't find any proof of this.
I had a talk with "Kayo Kyoku Plus" veteran JTM earlier tonight and one of the topics we covered was non-Japanese celebrities who hit it big in Japan in the music world, and I remembered the Norton interview. Plus, also realizing that Marcos had posted about Alyssa Milano's history in J-Pop a few nights ago, I just had to put up this one for Connelly.
