メロディー

A ballad so unguarded in its romanticism that it operates almost outside the defenses most contemporary listeners bring to music. The production is full — strings, piano, the kind of arrangement that earlier decades deployed without self-consciousness but that later eras learned to treat with irony — and 玉置浩二 simply ignores any impulse toward restraint. His voice is one of the phenomena of Japanese music: a tenor with warmth that seems to come from some deeper place than technique, capable of delivering a note with such directness that it bypasses the critical faculty entirely and arrives somewhere more primitive. The song is about love distilled to its purest expression — not a specific relationship with complications and history but the feeling itself, the thing that makes the beloved's face the most important thing in the world. There is nothing clever or ambiguous in the lyrical approach; it says what it means with complete conviction, which is either naive or brave depending on your relationship to that kind of openness. Culturally 玉置浩二 occupies a particular place in the Japanese musical imagination — the singer of irreducible emotional authority, the voice people cite when asked what Japanese pop is capable of at its most sincere. This is a song for very specific occasions: moments of genuine tenderness that need something to hold them in.