Nakamori Akina
PREAMBLE.
If you’ve ever spent time as fan or scholar or any kind of ‘cult’ anything, you will (I promise you) have found yourself involved at some point in a Categrisation Debate. Fans of Cult Things love taxonomies and categorisation schemas with a passion and demented dedication that makes evolutionary biologists and LisP programmers look like dilettantes. The ‘debate’ we’re going to locate this discussion within concerns the use of the expressions ‘Idol’ and ‘J-Pop’ and ‘City Pop’ and Kayo Kyoku, and which of these taxons we locate our subject today into.
The system of categorisation I was first introduced to, and the one I’ve stuck stubbornly to since, considers ‘Idol’ to be a mode of performer or performance and not an historical epoch. It refers to the Geological Age of approximately 1972 to 2007 as ‘J-Pop’ and identifies three Geological Periods within this (in the same way that the Mesozoic Age contains the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods), which for convenience it refers to as the Golden, Silver and Bronze ages. Unlike geological periods (but in common with human history in general, and popular culture in general), there are no identifiable cutoff points. Whilst it’s true that you can tell whereabouts in the Mesozoic you are by the size and shape of its apex Carnosaurs, you can also identify characteristic species markers of the three ages of J-Pop, but beyond your Yamaguchi Momoe, your Matsuda Seiko and your Amuro Namie, the borders are terribly porous.
This is really a long-winded way of saying that I don’t care much for the categorisations imposed, post-facto, on a part of human popular cultural history that had no thought or interest for them at the time. As we’ll discover elsewhere, for instance, whilst it’s tempting to identify the Golden Age with City Pop at large, City Pop had a much longer lifespan than that. Naturally, Marxists enjoy trying to spot epochs, and the revolutions that separate them, and whilst it’s both convenient and easy to identify the Golden Age as ending with the retirement of Yamaguchi Momoe in 1980, and the Silver Age coming to a close with the Econopocalypse of the collapse of the decade-plus boom that’s now called the Bubble, there’s a lot of overlap.
EXPOSITION.
Nakamori Akina consistently performs in character, and for convenience, we’ll say here that she performs as a character named Nakamori Akina, largely because, as Stanislavsky demands, actress-Akina disappears completely into her character. I know nothing about the ‘real’ Nakamori Akina apart from the one awful thing that everybody knows, and which it’s not useful or productive to dwell on. Maybe you’ve already seen the ghost of Nakamori Akina any you didn’t realise it. Maybe you’ve seen her, translucently picked out by headlights that belong to no apparent motor vehicle. Maybe you’ve seen her on a footbridge over a busy intersection, her complexion too radiant and luminous to be possible beneath the orange sodium vapour lamps. Maybe your encounter has been even more intimate and personal than that; perhaps you’ve felt the need, un-considered, animated by a will other than your own, to stop by, or go out to, a tiny late-night kissaten (or, if it’s that kind of neighbourhood, a one-room wiskey bar, with a bored proprietor drying glasses and watching late-night TV.). At the other end of the bar, or in the seat at the opposite corner to yours sits a woman of such incomparable beauty that it’s the magnitude more than the detail of it that will stick in your mind. You will not be able to clearly remember her face except to say that she was beautiful; you won;t be able to remember her clothes except to say, glamourous in a way that you didn’t think the present age was capable of. And you won’t correctly be able to recall if she spoke to you at all, or what she said, only with an overwhelming melancholy.
Or perhaps your own meeting already happened and maybe it was similar to mine. Perhaps it was about the year 2000, and you were searching for something different to the harshness and nihilism of the post-punk and math-rock and experimental hardcore that had been your constant companions since late adolesence. You’d already discovered exotica and ye-yea and they’d taken up a place of comfort in your consciousness. But then, motivated again, by a will that was not entirely your own, you found yourself fascinated by the name of Nakamori Akina and, like the protagonist of an M.R. James story or a Jean Rollin film, the very name seems to set off a memory that certainly can’t be your own, and you begin the process of research and to your dread / delight, you find yourself face-to-face with, not a vengeful spirit or even a lesbian vampire, but with the endlessly-fascinating world of Silver-age J-Pop and, as with a View from a Hill, new vistas open up for you.
Ten years after the fact, as it was when I first encountered Akina, the striking synaesthesia of her music is that is sounds exactly like you expected, exactly what your imagination had prepared you for, from everything you had read about Bubble-era Japan and half-remembered fragments of Television programmes by Clive James: the version of the 1980’s you auto-suggestively hallucinated, the exotic version that existed just beyond your own realm of experience. Not that you ever actually imagined the music itself. It’s more correct to say that hearing Akina for the first time is (in terms of Heidegger) an actualisation of a geist which, invited, turns out to precisely inhabit an absence whose general dimensions you were always aware of, but whose shape, colour, sound and smell were wholly new. That geist-actualisation is important to understanding what makes Silver-age J-Pop so hauntographic, because it is the real and actually-existing sound and colour of the monochrome 8mm film or the line-drawing animations you’d sketched in your own imagination. Maybe even things you believed you had witnessed for yourself – the sekai no yume, you’d actually been to, not just the Jerusalem of your Dreams but the world, in a summer holiday cultural exchange to West Germany or Czechoslovakia, (countries that did not even exist by the end of the Silver Age of J-Pop), but couldn’t bring home or even reliably tell anyone about because you were already bored of being told that you must be mistaken and that Socialism Did Not Work. So like a small-town American teenager who’s seen the spearhead to an alien invasion, you keep to yourself and wait for the day when you’ll be proven correct.
That day, of course, will never come. But Akina will comfort you, and you will understand that your memories of the possibilities of popular modernism were not mistaken, and you were not mistaken in paying attention to them.
Akina is an adventuress, a femme fatale, a tragedienne and a Nietzschen heroine. She is an Idol and an iconclast, and, like the iconclastic Zarathustras brought to life by James Cagney and Al Pacino, she almost never wins. She attains her status of being an Idol because she is the eternal outsider who dares to defy mundane society; and is destroyed for it; and only after her own destruction is she venerated as a goddess. The expression Idol is used in the context of the Silver Age of J-Pop in an explicitly Shinto sense, with all that implies, but Akina is special even above and beyond that for her persistence in a constant state of götterdämmerung. Not for nothing is her appearance and her music best suited for the time of day when the crepuscular becomes the nocturnal. The key here is that she is destroyed – with pitiless regularity – not by society (as if Akina would ever own to that kind of victimhood) and not even for her defiance, but because the Schopenhaurian defeat-drive, the Lacanian desire-to-desire offers a catharsis and a vitality that mere success never could. If you never fail, you’re probably not pushing yourself enough. And oh my goodness does Akina fail. In Akina’s hands, a standing-up becomes a Balaclava and being walked out on becomes a Thermopolae. And why not? Why is that only men get to present their Principled Defeats as more valuable than actual victories? For that matter, why is there such watchfulness and suspicion that real and actual victories may be Phyrric? As every sports fan knows, a victory is only ever fleeting, only ever a defeat postponed of deferred. Akina defers and postpones nothing. Everything is in the present tense, no mordant McCartney Yesterdays or speculative futures, only ever Now, the quintessence of modernity.
Nothing in Akina-world is done my halves, or in any measure short of Wagnerian excess. ‘Wagnerian’ is an adjective often prepended to Led Zeppelin, and the comparison isn’t as inapt as might at first be thought. For all their blustering machismo, Zep always sound fragile. Robert Plant’s most affecting vocal moments are when he sounds feminine, and the band’s best and most influential song is a assuredly a woman’s lament. Akina is feminine but hardly girly. Akina only ever needs to be Akina, she doesn’t need to cast herself as a black dog in wolf’s clothing, or as a Norse god, or even a Hom(o)erian ubermensch desined to fall to treachery and venality. Akina needs no nemesis or sworn enemy to bring about her downfall, and unlike even Pauline Reage’s heroine, she doesn’t need an externality to torture and humiliate her. She can do all of that herself, and like Constance Chatterley, not die of shame but witness the death of shame and be left shameless.
Akina does not warn her listeners, does not offer vicarious experience for them and never, ever sacrifices herself for them. If Akina stories are to be seen as cautionary tales, why, then are they so seductive and so attractive? If they are supposed to moral lessons, what morals, precisely, are advanced or critiqued? Even at her most preadatory, Akina is never immoral; she exists beyond morals or just deserts or fitting consequences. (McCarthy/Urotsukudoji) Akina achieves her Nietzschen-heroine status not because of her refusal to admit defeat, or because she gets up again, over and over, but because she understands the inevitability of defeat and seeks it anyway. In his spectacularly tasteless film “Star of David: Beautiful Girl Hunting”, Norifumi Suzuki gives his Holocaust-obsessed serial-killing sadist protagonist a line which approximately translates as “Beautiful women wear their beauty as a badge of shame, as a mark that no treatment is too disgraceful for them”, but Akina transforms disgrace into defiance, even its it’s only ever herself that she’s defying. It’s tempting to summarise Akina’s mutifaceted character(s) as ‘women who will gamble anything for love and passion’, but that’s not only oversimplifying, it’s untrue. There is no risk; no game of chance, because there is never any possibility of winning. Why would there be? Akina understands that winning is the end, and if there is a joissance that animates her on her thanatic-erotic ouroboureal journey, it’s that the only impossible, unaccaptable ending is the ending of the game. There’s no time here, not any more. I can’t go on I’ll go on. That’s the way I like it, baby, I don’t want to live forever.
All of this is an exposition of depressive thought, of course, but depression – the real thing, not the surface gloss, the part when Blue Turns To Grey, and not when Red gets Painted Black – is erotophobic (one reason I’ve come to characterise 21st century culture as merely depressive and not existentially melancholic), all Apollo and Thanatos, no Eros or Dionysus. Maybe a little Priapus – Akina is furiously libidinal and wildly emotional, in a force-of-nature way almost never ascribed to Female characters but rather reserved for a Hamlet or a Stanley Kowalski (never an Ophelia or a Blanche). Is it even necessary to state that she communicates her libidinality and emotionalism without a trace of vulgarity? Akina goes far beyond the gender-flipped drag-machismo of what passes for most of ‘strong female characters’ and enters a world as conceived by the most radical of the Radical Feminist thinkers (to apply a Hauntographic linguistic perspective, what Mary Daly calls ‘spooking’), beyond equality or similarity, wherein she is defined, not by her ability to impersonate Masculine characteristics, but by irrational, emotional, Feminine ones, and where her reward – endlessly renewed, like the food from Bran’s platter or wine from the Holy Grail – is to keep her narrative un-foreclosed, like the greatest heroes of Classical Romance. And which of us ever wants the stories to halt? Whoever wins, the saddest day in Football is F.A Cup Day. Oh God, don’t let Peace break out.
Does Akina care what we think of her? It’s hard to say. Doesn’t her manicured, fragrant beauty bespeak at least a little vanity? It’s worth considering whether any iteration of pride, self-respect and self-held standards (and by extension, admiration, respect for others and recognition of greatness) are at their root expressions of vanity and envy, and it’s by no means evident that vanity and envy are negative human responses. Akina was born beautiful for sure, but natural beauty is never going to be enough for a life that doesn’t so much express art as to be art. Ideally, it’s necessary to watch the videos of her mesmerising, in-character performances. Watch carefully as Akina animates her life-as-art and exoticises herself into one avatar after another. The song ‘Tattoo’ demands no less than three similar but different promo clips (normally designated as ‘red’, blue’ and ‘green’, for reasons that become obvious when you watch them), and they are all utterly beguiling.
Akina is Hauntographical because to all intents and purposes, she is the Phantom Hitchhiker. You can give her a lift and enjoy her company, but you will never have her, or take her home. When you look in the back of the car, and find nothing there but the inevitable abandoned jacket, and look in the pocket, the address on the empty envelope you’ll find there is not the address of a cemetary, but (because Japanese addresses are confusing) an out-of-the-way city block where after a careful search, you’ll find a tiny all-night Suntory Bar. You can go inside if you want, take a seat on a crimson blush bar-stool or an excessively-brocaded bucket chair, but she won’t be there. She will already have left, the patron will tell you. No, he doesn’t know when she’ll be back. Sometimes she comes in for five days in a row, and sometimes she’s absent for a month. But she’s gone now, back to her Lonely Night In The Rain, always alone and never owned. You’ll never forget your Akina experience, and it will leave a sense of tristesse than will stay with you for ever. Congratulations, you’ve experienced for yourself one of the ecstatic failures that Akina acts and re-enacts, not out of habituation or damnation but out of desire to desire, the only kind of longing really worth having.
In his essay on Joy Division, Mark Fisher states that the band are important because, from their time, they accurately foresaw ours: our present, their future. Considering that Akina has what could only understatedly be described as ‘excess passion’, or what Gail Carriger would call ‘excessive soul’, one of the most gratifying aspects of her actual digenic performances is that they are utterly free from the flaccid signifiers of Soul. Like Steve Howe, she refuses to deal in Blues Cliches. Akina is more like cracked cabaret – a Jazz Age or Weimar Republic as seen from Taisho Japan, the delirious party-at-the-end-of-the world – or else the most stately, immaculately-executed iteration of Kayo Kyouku J-Pop that the Silver Age ever witnesses; in doing so, it draws a parallel between the decadence of the Weimar Republic and the Bubble Era, the good times that are going to have to end. Her future. Our present. The pink telephone at the end of the counter in the all-night kissaten replaced with the omnipresent Secret Police Detective of the cell phone. Nowadays you don’t even have to put on your trenchcoat over your lingerie and go out to be lonely and wait for the phone to ring (with the possibility of a chance encounter with another lonely soul. Akina also had her own personalised pre-paid cards for use in those cafe telephones. You don’t think she’d give anyone her home number, do you?). You can do it in the comfort of your own home, with no risk of meeting anyone at all. Don’t want them catching you out after curfew. The long cancellation of the future is the sick father and mother that make children of us all, not grown-up just grown-old, not experienced, just jaded, and we need real adults like eighteen-year-old Akina now more ever.
Akina makes sense of an era that made no sense at the time. We’ve already said that her end-times were prefiguations of larger end times, and how the fear of loss of dynamism and loss of discourse was more dreadful than the actual apocalypse; but look at how effortless she makes the ’80’s appear. She never looks even for one second, not absolutely of her time, even when she’s channelling Rita Hayworth or riffing cabaret (it is widely recognised how much ’30’s fetishism there was in the ’80’s, or is that a particular preoccupation of mine?). It’s a mistake to suggest that she’s ‘in charge’ or ‘at the centre’ of anything, because that’s another kind of vulgarity she never stoops to. Watch her as closely as you want, and you never get the impression that you can keep your gaze on her; it keeps sliding off, being eluded (and that’s why she’s never an object). It’s actually very difficult keep a clear image of her in your mind. Fragments, impressions – indelible impressions for that matter – but never a complete picture. She won’t return your gaze or confront it; it’s more correct to say that it has no effect on her. In the Me Decade, too many people were squabbling to be the centre of attention. In Akina’s music programme appearances, the camera seems to want to not put her front-and-centre. She’s always there, but on the verticals of the golden mean (with typical perversity, exactly where Aristotle thinks she should be….for the one and only time.). During the zooms, the camera slides off her. She won’t be Gazed at or Crosshaired, and the parts of the screen that haven’t got her in them are as poignantly absent as the other parts are pointedly present.
The first time I heard ‘Desire – Jounetsu’, I felt a sense of homecoming that was more homely and where-I-belong than any actual homecoming I’ve ever experienced. The first time I listened to ‘Kita Wing’ when I knew the title (a good two years after I’d first heard the track – wrongly marked-up cassettes will do that to you), I almost fainted with the realisation that I was listening to it whilst walking though the South Wing of Hankyu San-Bangai. ‘Fin’ succeeded in dislodging a ten-year-old earworm (I don’t, of course, know what song it was that gave me the earworm, but I can remember where I was and what I was doing when it happened and it kept popping into my head in the ghostly way that half-heard, incorrectly-remembered fragments of songs will do.) And the one-and-only time I’ve ever actually been in Ginza a night-time, you can bet I made sure to listen to ‘I Missed The Shock’ to see if it would fulfil expectation. I shouldn’t ever have had any doubts.
The last time I listened to ‘Nanpa Sen’ was in a hotel lobby in Nishi-Nippori; I put it on because the Hotel Lobby Mantovani of the middle-eight seemed ironically appropriate. Very, very quickly, I realised how wrong I was to bring anything as emotionally impure as irony to that situation, and the effect was so profound that I’ve never been near that song again. When I took off the headphones, there was actual Hotel Lobby Mantovani playing, and it was the closest I’ve ever come to an actual M.R.James experience. It was a thoroughly unnerving experience, and it accounts for some, but not all of the reason I’ve never willingly been without Akina to listen to since. But not that song.
So where to go from here if you’ve not yet had your own Akina experience and your curiosity is piqued? The spectacular run of albums Fanatsy, Etranger, Anniversary, Possibility, Bitter and Sweet, D404ME, Fushigi, Crimson, Stock, Femme Fatale and Cruise, spanning the astonishingly short space of time between 1983 and 1989 are all worth your time and effort. There is a notable omission in the list, the almost-inevitable Ill-Advised English Language album Cross my Palm which sadly can’t even be categorised as ‘for fans only’. And for first choice, I’d actually advise avoiding Fushigi. This isn’t to say it’s a bad album – on the contrary, it’s one of my favourite albums ever, and will end up having an article all to itself; but it’s best approached not as an outlier, or Japanese idol album for people who don’t like Japanese idol music (which is how it’s often reviewed), but as a the work of an artist at the absolute height of her powers, with the confidence and ability to make such a step beyond, and for that to work, it’s necessary to ground oneself in the Akina oervre to begin with. So the best place to start is almost certainly one of the almost innumerable singles compilations that are widely available second-hand or By Other Means. Don’t worry about obtaining the original, official compilation albums (BEST and BEST II), anything you can find will have the twenty-or-so essential songs on it.
The idea is to frequently revisit the best moments of Akina, so this is to be hoped to be a work in progress.
And whilst the songs are really the reason for being here, it helps a great deal to spend a little time looking at some of the many, many performances which can be viewed online. I’m not prepared to say that watching the performances is a prerequisite for understanding the music (the music speaks quite well for itself, thank-you, and it satisfied me for almost fifteen years before I even saw many of the performances), but they are unique artefacts in their own right. The most otherworldly and affecting are the ones which incidentally come as part of weekly music programmes like Best Ten, because they are the ones that correctly contextualise Akina in the context of being a properly popular performer, and serve to highlight just how special her performances are.