富士山下

"富士山下" is the Cantonese original of that melody, and it is a colder, stranger, better song. Wyman Wong's central conceit is a piece of hard logic dressed as scenery: you cannot own Mount Fuji, so you carry away only the photograph and the memory of standing there — and the same is true of a person. The metaphor unspools through a snowscape of images, gloves, scarves, breath in cold air, a lover being talked out of grief by someone who is clearly not over it either. Chak's melody rises in long patient arcs; the arrangement keeps piano and strings austere so the words can do the cutting. Eason Chan sings it almost gently, which is what makes it devastating — no rasp, no belt, just a man reasoning himself toward acceptance while his voice keeps giving him away at line-ends. Widely voted the greatest Cantopop song of its decade, it functions in Hong Kong as a shared text: everyone knows what "you can't possess the mountain" means without explanation. Listen alone, headphones, preferably somewhere cold and outdoors, when you are trying to convince yourself that having loved someone is enough and you are not yet convinced.