Wikipedia article on First Love
Her name is written 宇多田ヒカル、 in katakana, first name, which is kind of a hippy flourish. I have known カヲリs, which a super-hippy-sixties name, which I would have thought an illegal name under Japanese law (turns out not), kind of like using a number or punctuation as the legal name of an English-language child.
Now she writes is as 光 in kanji.
A young woman, the child of entertainers, returned to Japan while I was living there.
I found this album to be among the most cohesive album I've ever encountered. It seems to paint an arc of "first love" from excitement and hope to the realization of being trapped to pain to resignation. The flipping back and forth between English and Japanese made this feeling more poignant for me for...reasons.
I played it on loop at a tough time when my relationship seemed to be melting down and I was in a not-so-great place, rather like some of the songs depict.
I maintain, semi-flippantly, that Japanese is the only language for properly talking about human feelings and relationships, rather like talking about cooking or sex outside of French is kind of a waste of time. Talking about sex in English has about the same poetic quality as talking about highway construction, for example. One thing about Japanese (and French) is that the parts of the body is less "nuanced" or "loaded" without being clinical--something like that.
I don't know if I want to mention this, but I thought about the subtle difference between, say, "ikanakatta," and "ikenakatta", which Japanese people would totally pick up on.
It's an impression, of course, but it has to do with the head-last default sentence structure, how feelings are literally baked into the grammatical structure of the language (someone else thinking/feeling something has its own verb tense, being made to do/feel something by somebody else and being emotionally traumatized by that, and wanting/not wanting that is a verb tense, etc., etc., etc.), "sentence incompleteness" is much more permissible than say, in English (or French), and the lability with which noun phrases may be plugged in everywhere and modified and also "tagged" with modifiers which are effectively verbals but which act like adjectivals with the compactness and versatility of Latinate/Germanic tags used in English like "non-" or "un-" or "counter-" or "über-" or "-like" and these are everywhere in Japanese, and Utada applies them to the English phrases peppering her songs in the same way (like the "Bonnie & Clyde" reference, which Serge Gainsbourg also referenced, by the way--Bonnie & Clyde really seem to be top-of-mind in some parts of the world). Japanese also has tens of thousands of "onomotopoeic words" (sei-on-go or gi-on-go) that convey things like "that feeling of heart-pounding anticipatory excitement" which may be combined and inflected into a single word such as doki-doki-sasetakute tamaranai (roughly "to luxuriate in the wanting to be made to feel that feeling of heart-pounding anticipatory excitement") which is effectively a single word in Japanese and may also be treated as a single stand-alone sentence. French and Spanish have interesting interjective/prepositionals such as "chez quelque chose" or "Ojalá" and Japanese is rife with these sorts of things, in all sorts of grammatical incarnations.
All this may be why Japan and Japanese are so interesting to us in the West, from Pocket Monsters (Pokèmon), Manga, Animé, Costume Play (cosplay), etc.
In terms of writing lyrics, Japanese has so many different ways of "conjugating" verbs and sentences and the ability to drop whole parts of sentences (especially of already mentioned themes) and adding more and more particles and endings that it makes matching up verses more flexible. The language is phonetically like Spanish however, ie, phoneme-poor, so it's relatively easy to rhyme and establish rhythm, unlike English, where it's a challenge, and also a challenge to squeeze word lengths into a meter scheme, which can make English (and French and German and Russian, etc.) songs "catchier" and I feel that Utada used her peppering of catchy English phrases into her lyrics worked to mollify this.
Some Japanese pop bands have the annoying habit of completing an enjambement by adding the hallmark of Yokohama dialect, i.e., a final "sa". It reminds me of the '80s band HEART which seemed to love this sort of lazy, gratuitous end-rhyming. Mercifully, Utada didn't do this anywhere. I'm sure I would've found it jarring.
I didn't know that this album transformed Japanese pop and was and still is the best-selling album of all time in the East until I read it on Wikipedia. I read it described as "hip-hop." I don't pretend to know what that means, as such.
My desperate prayer is that if we're going to go down the favorite rabbit hole of which musical genres are which and such, that participating rabbits or Alices at least explain what musical features and time periods and regions and bands and music critics and such are involved in determining whether a given song or album was Lower Slobonian Life-Support Metal or Splunge Gizmo Glop-Glop or what-have-you, otherwise the discussion risks to be stultifying for the rest of us. Can this album considered to be "hip-hop" (or whatever) because it "seems" like hip-hop? Since it's effectively a Japanese album, can it be squeezed into such classifications? Or can we look at the influences on Utada, on her parents, on their earlier work in New York? Was she part of a trend or a collection of influences which she then brought back to Japan? The impression in the media in Japan was that it was a kind of "homecoming" of a child of Japan who had been away her whole life, and that this was her first effort and that it was a uniquely Japanese one.
Songs on Album
1. Automatic
2. Movin' on Without You
3. In My Room
4. First Love
5. Amai Wana 甘い罠 "Paint it Black" (Sweet Trap)
6. Time Will Tell
7. Never Let Go
8. B&C
9. Another Chance
10. Internude
11. Give Me a Reason
12. Automatic (Johnny Vicious Remix)
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