- Lyrics & Music: Kazuya Yoshii
- Arrangement: The Yellow Monkey
Original Lyrics
暮れ行く太陽の下で祈りを捧げ
「快楽の中で死にたい」と囁いてる
いたいけな欲望が悪い爪を欲しがる
一粒の涙がわずかな夢を叶え
禁断の果実を一つ残らずかじり
ビロードのドレスをさいて
花を踏みにじる結末は
True love あわれみの Suicide
レクイエムは魔性の天使の歌声で
Make love 裏切るノスタルジー
Ah baby 嘆くなり我が夜の Fantasy
身体を揺らして全てを忘れるために
ジルバを踊ろう柔らかな唇で
劇薬のミルフィーユを
ほおばる君が好きだから
True love あわれみの Suicide
シンフォニーは野性を駆きたてるメロディーで
Make love 叶わぬノスタルジー
Ah baby 嘆くなり我が夜の
ざくろの色で描く自画自賛のシナリオ
クリスタルに写した美獣乱舞のシルエット
薄化粧はそのままで
憂いのナイフでひと思いに
True love あわれみの Suicide
レクイエムは魔性の天使の歌声で
Make love 実らぬノスタルジー
Ah baby 嘆くなり我が夜のファンタジー
Make love Fantasy
Make love Fantasy
Make love
Romanized Lyrics
kure yuku taiyou no shita de inori wo sasage
“kairaku no naka de shinitai” to sasayaiteru
itaike na yokubou ga warui tsume wo hoshigaru
hitotsubu no namida ga wazuka na yume wo kanae
kindan no kajitsu wo hitotsu nokorazu kajiri
biroodo no dress wo saite
hana wo fumi nijiru ketsumatsu wa
True love awaremi no Suicide
requiem wa mashou no tenshi no utagoe de
Make love uragiri nostalgia
Ah baby nageku nari wagayoru no Fantasy
karada wo yurashite subete wo wasureru tame ni
jiruba wo odorou yawaraka na kuchibiru de
gekiyaku no mille-feuille wo
hoobaru kimi ga suki dakara
True love awaremi no Suicide
symfony wa yasei wo kakitateru melody de
Make love kanawanu nostalgia
Ah baby nageku nari wagayoru no
zakuro no iro de egaku jigajisan no scenario
crystal ni utsushita bijuu ranbu no silhouette
usugeshou wa sono mama de
urei no knife de hito omoi ni
True love awaremi no Suicide
requiem wa mashou no tenshi no utagoe de
Make love minoranu nostalgia
Ah baby nageku nari wagayoru no Fantasy
Make love Fantasy
Make love Fantasy
Make love
Translated Lyrics
Offering a prayer beneath the darkening sun
You’re whispering “I want to die in the throes of pleasure”
Your innocent desires want to show their horrible claws
A single tear makes a small part of your dreams come true
And you chew on the forbidden fruit, not leaving a single one
The end result of tearing off that velvet dress
And crushing those flowers under-foot, is…
True love, compassionate suicide
A requiem is sung with the voices of devilish angels
Make love, your nostalgia will betray you
Ah baby, as soon as we lamented, our night’s fantasy began
Shaking your body to forget about it all
Let’s do the jitterbug, with soft lips
I love it when your cheeks
Are stuffed full of poisoned mille-feuille
True love, compassionate suicide
A symphony plays with a melody that stirs up your wild nature
Make love, your nostalgia won’t come to pass
Ah baby, as soon as we lamented, our night’s…
A scenario where you’re singing your own praises, drawn in the colors of a pomegranate
The silhouette of a rock in a hard place, reflected in crystal
With just light makeup on
Plunge in the knife of grief
True love, compassionate suicide
A requiem is sung with the voices of devilish angels
Make love, your nostalgia is fruitless
Ah baby, as soon as we lamented, our night’s fantasy began
Make love Fantasy
Make love Fantasy
Make love
Notes
This was the last single that came out before the album Smile itself did, having been released on 03/01/1995. It was also a regular number for the band ever since their indie days, so it’s interesting that it’s only now being recorded and released. It’s said that the lyrics were changed slightly for the recording, though there’s no mention of what the changes were. No early recordings of performances are to be found, the oldest being from the Jaguar Hard Pain tour in 1994 (prior to the release of the single). So it’s more or less impossible to say what changes the song may have gone through.
This is also the final “hold-out” song from Yemon’s early days:
Actually, when it came to song writing, I was really in a big slump during “smile” (our fourth album). “Love Communication” was me heatedly saying “You want pop songs?! I can make as many of them as you want, whenever you want!” in a very frantic way. When actually, that song was tacked on: It wasn’t originally supposed to be on “smile” at all. I said that I wanted to make “Venus no Hana” the single, but everyone else said it wasn’t strong enough. I thought “It isn’t strong enough!?”, and lost my temper. I said “Alright, you just wait and see!”, then I wrote it. “nageku nari wa ga yoru no Fantasy” was the last in the series of songs we had stored away from our indie days to release later. Everything after that were songs that we wrote since getting signed. We were definitely pretty baffled as to how we should face up to being signed to a major record label. So we started with “skimming the fat”, so to speak.
While I think that Love Communication is probably the strongest of the three singles from Smile, this one is my favorite. The history of the song makes sense given that my read on this was that it’s a perfect blend of the way Yoshii wrote lyrics back on Bunched Birth/Night Snails and the more pop-y instrumentation that Yemon have gone with for most of the songs on Smile. This ends up making it sound more like something we’ll hear more regularly a couple albums later, on something like Sicks. The chorus is as catchy as just about anything Yoshii has ever written, and is really heightened by the backing vocals layered underneath it. And such an upbeat chorus beginning with a lyric like “True love, compassionate suicide” before going on to talk about a requiem or symphony is just classic Yoshii song writing.
Linguistically, there are a couple of interesting things here. For starters, the title of the song! It features “waga”, a very old and formal way of saying “my” or “our”. It’s most often heard in phrases like “waga sha” (“our company” from the perspective of someone that works there) or “waga kuni” (“our country”, again from the perspective of someone who lives in it). Apart from those things, you’ll typically see it in literature and not in speech. And since we’re on the subject of the title, I’ll make a confession: I don’t particularly like my translation of the title. It’s just that as a phrase it’s so vague and weird, and the lyrics surrounding it in the chorus don’t really give much more context to it. I don’t necessarily think the translation is wrong, I just feel like there’s some nuance that I haven’t caught onto yet.
(Performance from the Four Seasons tour in 1996)
I’d also never heard the expression “bijuu ranbu” before this. The individual characters don’t have an obvious meaning when you look at them together: “bi” is “beauty”, “juu” is “beast”, and “ranbu” is a “boisterous dance”. Thinking it must be some kind of proverb, I was a surprised at what I found when I looked it up: It’s the Japanese name of Aerosmith’s 1982 album “Rock in a Hard Place”. Every mention of this term I could find referred to the album, and not a pre-existing phrase. This was probably included since members of Yemon are notably Aerosmith fans, particularly Emma.
This has been played live a good amount of times over the years, and continues to appear in set-lists from time to time: Jaguar Hard Pain tour (1994), Four Seasons tour (1996), Tokyo Dome Super Big Egg (2017), and 30th Anniversary Dome Tour (2020) Amusingly, at the time of release it was also selected as the ending theme song for the TV variety program starring Beat Takeshi and Jouji Tokoro: Takeshi Tokoro no Dracula ga Neratteru.
(The music video for Nageku Nari Waga Yoru no Fantasy)
