... and the sugar turned bitter.

When I first dropped over the cliff into idol fandom, the delineation between what was real and what was not wasn’t so clear. A lot of the information I gleaned about Morning Musume in those early days actually came from livejournal fanfiction. This was how I learnt everyone’s names, this was how I learnt about their friendships and foibles, and, needless to say, this is how I also became convinced of imaginary relationships, but that’s maybe not relevant right now. I digress. When I first heard Honto wa ne., I had no context for what was fiction and what was real, and not understanding that the song was from a movie, all I saw was Sonim, singing words written by someone else, interpreting the context of those moments as real and believing these words to be written by a girl diagnosed with terminal cancer. I cried every time I heard it.

Good news, everyone! Yorico, the song’s original author, is not dead. As a child, she was diagnosed with throat cancer at the age of 13, yet still survived, the cancer going into remission. In 2002, the film, Tenshi no Utagoe 〜 Shoni Byoto no Kiseki 〜 was released, staring Matsuura Aya in the role of Yorico herself, the movie’s release following the publication of her autobiography and the introduction of Yorico, then 16-years-old, to Morning Musume’s then manager, Wada Kaoru, by Fukuda Asuka. The song was so popular following Ayaya’s cover of it during the movie that it was again later covered by Okumura Hatsune, who is still presently signed to avex, as far as I know, and in 2009 even released a duet with Ken the 390, whom some of you might know from his storied career as an artist, and whom others might know as a coach on Produce 101 Japan The Girls.

Originally released on the indie label, Harmony Records, Honto wa ne. exploded in popularity following the Ayaya movie, Yorico’s debut album, Aizenaha, shifting 80,000 copies. Several years later, Sonim, also on Harmony, released a cover of the song, which was the first time I heard it, a TV performance of her standing in the snow with Yorico on a keyboard behind her, playing her heart out, trying her best to convey the emotion of those words. Having no understanding of Japanese at the time, I felt the emotion but could not understand the nuance until the very end when the final verse is delivered in English, which I will now quote verbatim:

“I wanted to tell you something at the graduation ceremony but I was overcome with the emotion, so I did not have a chance. Good-bye, I loved you.”

I wasn’t going to write about Yorico for this entry, I wanted to talk to you about how much I love Sonim, how much I loved her even when she was in EE Jump with genuine bad boy, Goto Yuki, brother of Morning Musume’s Goto Maki. I don’t actually think I’m the right person to be talking about Yorico, I own none of her records, but at the same time, I can’t talk about Sonim without talking about Honto wa ne., and I can’t talk about Honto wa ne. without talking about the song’s author. At 22, Yorico suffered from a second scare, an ovarian tumour that was eventually removed, during which time, she re-evaluated her life, writing on her website, "I have been singing for myself until to-day, but from now on, I will sing for others."

Yorico’s words had a tremendous impact on me. Even when I did not know her, even when all I had were little bits of story and fact and the feeling of that one song, the image of Sonim in the snow. Takano Yoriko, known to us as Yorico, was never a member of Morning Musume, never even a member of Hello!Project, and yet despite all this it is her words and music, her story, shaped what the group would be in the early ’00s.

Yorico’s website is still live, complete with RealPlayer clips of some of her songs, and her blog is still being updated, and I absolutely encourage you to visit, to familiarise yourself with her work. Like CHARA, like Onitsuka Chihiro, I genuinely believe her to be one of the most important voices of her generation, of our generation. If you haven’t listened to her music before, I really want to encourage you to do so. Time and time again, against all odds, her words have been a comfort to me. I hope you too can find some comfort in them also.