I’ve been a fan of a Japanese pop singer named aiko for six or seven years. No, that’s not right. I’ve been in love with aiko for six or seven years. (Is it possible to find a soul mate in somebody you’ve never met, and probably never will meet?) I discovered her quite by accident in 2000 or 2001, when I stumbled upon somebody’s personal Web site that had three or four MP3s of aiko’s music. I’d never listened to J-Pop before, so I listened out of curiosity.
It was love at first listen. She had this “little girl” voice; not in the sense of the anime-character-like voice that is so common among J-Pop “idol” singers, but a “natural”, young-sounding voice. It was far from the best voice I’d ever heard — I could go on all day listing singers with better voices. But there was something … I have to say it was her delivery. Simply put, despite not understanding a word she was singing I could literally feel, with every bone in my body, the emotions behind the songs. Among those first songs were Hanabi, which filled me with happiness. Another was Kabutomushi, still one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. Listening to it made me feel deep sorrow, but also an undercurrent of hope; a few years later I finally found an English translation, and the lyrics mirrored the emotions I felt listening to the song. Both of those songs were from her 1999 debut album. She was 23 or 24 when that album came out; I learned that she writes all her own lyrics and music.
Watch her perform live, and try to tell me you don’t smile a bit. Here’s a woman doing what she loves and loving what she does:
Working the crowd (and her band) in 2005: Part I and Part II
I have been accused of liking her simply because she’s “cute”, but those accusations are wrong. I was in love long before I knew what she looked like. I found her early in her career, so photos were scarce on the Internet; in any case, aiko is a common name in Japan, and the fact that she uses only her given name made searching for photos an exercise in futility (there were a number of other, more famous Aiko’s at the time - in fact, that’s how I originally stumbled onto those first MP3s: I was searching for photos of an actress named Aiko Something-or-other).
Anyway, having said all that, I’ll get to my point. I need some help from the Dopers who live in Japan and are fluent in speaking and reading Japanese. In late August she released two songs, with accompanying videos, apparently simultaneously. In a way, these two songs are similar to those first songs I heard all those years ago. The first new song, Yokogao is a fun, happy song, like Hanabi, and the video tells a cute story that is pretty self-explanatory without needing to understand the lyrics.
The second song, Hoshi no Nai Sekai, is a whole 'nother story. I’m a grown man. You know that saying, “grown men don’t cry”? It’s wrong. This song/video left me in tears, and I don’t freaking know why! I could maybe find a translation of the song lyrics eventually (translations of aiko songs are pretty scarce, unfortunately), but I think understanding the story in the video depends a great deal on being able to understand aiko’s spoken parts at the beginning and end, as well as being able to read the handwritten kanji that appear prominently throughout the video.
Are any fluent Dopers willing to help me out with this? I don’t need a detailed transcription, just a basic outline of the story being told. I think the young girl and the older woman in the video are supposed to be the same character, but beyond that …