きらり

Built as a car commercial anthem and somehow one of the most bittersweet things he's written. "Kirari" — a word for a glint, a sparkle catching the eye — runs on a rubbery disco-funk bassline and a four-on-the-floor pulse that's polished to a chrome finish, all clipped guitar stabs and glassy synth pads, the most straightforwardly *produced* record in his catalogue after the raw piano of the debut. But the lyric under the shine is about impermanence: the beautiful thing is beautiful *because* it's passing, and the appropriate response is to keep moving forward without grasping. Fujii sings almost entirely in a light, sighing head voice, more breath than body, which puts a strange melancholy on top of dance-floor machinery. The Okayama dialect softens the edges of what could otherwise be a slogan. There's a Bee Gees ancestry in the falsetto and a Michael Jackson tightness in the rhythm programming, filtered through Japanese city-pop's affection for gleam and surface. It works as pure surface — an ad soundtrack, a summer drive, a windows-down song — and rewards you later when you notice it's a Buddhist thought wearing a very good jacket. Ideal for morning highway driving alone, sun low, nothing decided yet about the rest of the day.