赤いスイートピー

"赤いスイートピー" is Matsuda Seiko at her most restrained, and it works because of what it withholds. Yumi Matsutoya wrote the melody (as Karuho Kureta) and Matsumoto Takashi the words, and the arrangement is nearly pastel: acoustic guitar, gentle strings, a rhythm that walks rather than dances, everything cushioned in early-'80s Japanese studio warmth. Seiko's voice sits high and thin with that famous small break in it — a kind of engineered fragility that made her the definitive idol of the decade — but here she underplays, letting phrases trail off. The lyric is a masterpiece of Japanese pop miniature: a girl on a train platform, a boy who won't hold her hand, the line "心の岸辺に咲いた 赤いスイートピー" turning a flower into evidence of a feeling neither has named. Crucially, red sweet peas didn't exist when the song was written — the image is invented, a small impossibility standing in for adolescent longing. In 1982 this was the sound of aspirational girlhood in a booming Japan; today it functions as a national memory object, covered endlessly, played in cafes and drugstores. It suits a slow spring afternoon, or the specific melancholy of remembering someone you never actually dated.