Kusuri wo Takusan

There is a weightless peculiarity to this song — Taeko Ohnuki constructs a sonic space that feels both clinical and dreamlike, built around a stuttering, almost toy-box arrangement of piano, muted brass, and lightly brushed percussion that never quite settles into conventional groove. The tempo drifts like afternoon light through half-closed blinds, unhurried yet deliberate. Ohnuki's voice is the defining instrument: airy and conversational, it sits close to the listener's ear without urgency, threading through the melody with a detachment that reads more as philosophical than cold. The song circles around themes of medication, dependency, and the quiet surrender that comes with letting something external regulate your inner weather — there's dark irony encoded in the lightness of the delivery. This is mid-1970s Tokyo art pop at its most idiosyncratic, emerging from a moment when Japanese musicians were absorbing American soft rock and Brazilian tropicália and transmuting them into something distinctly their own. Ohnuki had recently departed Sugar Babe and was carving out a solo identity that resisted easy categorization, and this track reflects that restless intelligence. You reach for it in the blue hours of late afternoon when you want music that holds a mirror up to strangeness without demanding anything of you — it observes rather than comforts, but there's a odd tenderness in that observation.