帰ろう

The closing song of his debut album and the one that turns his whole persona serious. "Kaerou" means *let's go home*, and home here is unmistakably death — not as horror but as return, the place we all go back to and where nothing needs to be carried. It's built on a slow, hymn-like piano figure, chords voiced wide and simple, with strings entering so gradually you don't notice until they've already changed the room's temperature. Fujii's vocal is the least ornamented on record: nearly conversational in the verses, then rising in the chorus into a long-held, cracked-open tone that sounds like the moment before crying rather than crying itself. The lyric is about forgiveness on both ends — asking whether he can go having said what he needed to say, and admitting the things he didn't. It addresses a *you* who is dead, or dying, or simply gone. In Japan the song has functioned almost liturgically since release, played at memorials and funerals, and his own live performances of it habitually collapse audiences. It earns that: nothing in the arrangement pushes for the reaction. Listen alone, ideally not while driving. It will find the specific person you haven't finished talking to.