9. 'ボーイ (A Boy)' by Douji Morita (1977)

through the changing seasons, this sad yet peaceful chamber folk record is vital

Now then, this is the good stuff. The nights are drawing in. You are waking up in the dark. Your lips are chapped, your legs are heavy. The venomous bite of the changing seasons is starting to take effect: this is the remedy.

I assume the vast majority of you are streaming service people, so I’ll start by saying: this is not on streaming services, but it is on YouTube in full (embedded below), you can get it secondhand on vinyl pretty cheap, and searching the artist, album title and “blogspot” into Google will give you the high quality mp3 files you seek. I am assuming that a reissue will not be wildly far off – bits and pieces are going up on streaming services - but 'ボーイ (A Boy)' (1977) remains long out of print.

There are certain kinds of music that just really do it for me, and certain kinds that simply don’t. I am old enough to know that no matter how much I appreciate slithers and slathers of metal, power electronics or “IDM”, it will very rarely do it for me.

Conversely, library jazz music, psychedelia, and MPB seem to very rarely miss. I would say, rather than being enthusiastic about all music, I am just extremely interested in hundreds of different disparate genres, scenes and sounds. An “I know what I like” guy that happens to really like an awful lot of things.

The style of music known these days as “chamber-folk” is certainly something that really, really does it for me. Folk songs spun into whole worlds by expansive instrumentation, with arrangements wilting to the whim of the artist – that’s the stuff. Way better than one-guy-one-guitar folk music.

I’d count a bunch of my favourite artists as belonging to this style, Joanna Newsom, Ichiko Aoba, Nick Drake, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and, of course, today’s focus, Douji Morita.

Inspired by the same nationwide student protest movement that birthed Les Rallizes Denudes, Douji Morita was a deeply mysterious presence in 70s Japan. She garnered a following in Japan by writing songs of grief and heartbreak several shades darker those her idol peers’, but made it a personal mission to ensure she also maintained her distance from fans.

She never revealed any personal information, and from 1975 to 1983, the period in which she was active, she only ever appeared in public wearing big black sunglasses and disguising her face with thick curly hair so no one could ever really see her face. It’s hard to know for sure why – unconfirmed reports allege “Nepo Baby” status, whilst I simply for prefer Morita to be an enigma.

There is very little concrete fact about Morita, with most English language blogs and video essays operating strictly on hearsay and legend, but there is a piece of concrete information about her that is perhaps crucial to understanding Morita’s artistic output. In the early 70s, she lost a very close friend (whose true identity, like Morita’s own, remains a mystery), and the catastrophic levels of grief were the muse for Morita’s albums, something that would begin with her debut ‘Goodbye’ (1975) but remain right through her career.

Even by today’s post-Morrissey, post-Sparklehorse, post-Sufjan standards, Morita’s singing and songwriting remains uniquely melancholic, morbid and maudlin – this is very much dramatic, sad music, about being dramatically sad, conveyed in such a tone of overpowering sadness that it kiboshes any language barrier.

But by god, is it beautiful.

‘A Boy’ (1977) is her third album. It is the most fully realised version of her anguished ‘chamber folk’, and whilst the subject matter is bleak, and the songs are very sad, it is a life-affirming listen. In the midst of her deeply meditative and reflective songs, Morita always finds euphoria, which is here best manifested by the exquisite arrangements.

Morita’s gentle voice is charming, and her shaky acoustic guitar is accompanied by a cast of cinematic strings, freewheeling guitar and soft Hammond organ, as well as pastoral wind and birdsong field recordings, which together create something deeply stirring and poignant.

Morricone is probably the first person I think of when trying to find a touchstone, but other soundtrack masters of the era, like Riz Ortolani and Ahmed Malek, are not far off it – for these are such dramatic and characterful songs. However, the music on this disk is far from one-note film-score crescendo-core, as with each track Morita pulls together seemingly disparate influences into one cohesive whole.

‘In G Line’ (‘Ｇ線上にひとり’) has a devastating piano line, emotive trills encircle Morita’s voice as it wilts and winds through a ballad most tender, whilst ‘With You I Become a Lonely Wind’ (‘君と淋しい風になる’) has a dizzying guitar solo and klezmer-inspired violins that pull the track to-and-fro’ in the breeze.

‘Didn’t You See Me?’ (’ぼくを見かけませんでしたか)’ has a gorgeous fingerpicked flamenco guitar, and album closer ‘No. 3 for Finale: “Letter for my friend”' (‘終曲のために 第３番「友への手紙」’) features a string quartet requiem atop, before Morita’s phantomic voice materialises to deliver sprechstimme poems of heartbreak.

The obvious highlight, though is ‘You’re Trembling’ (‘ふるえているネ’), an opera in four minutes, a truly exquisite piece of music. There is beauty here in repetition, as Morita’s cello swells to create a delicate soundscape, punctuated by starry twinkles emanating from the piano. The lyrics below.

In the palm of my hand,
You’re trembling, aren’t you?
In the gentle
Cup of my hands, you can die as you are,
Unable to fly, my swallowtail butterfly.

source: https://morita-doji.tumblr.com/post/128833884144/ふるえているネ-youre-trembling-arent-you-森田童子

If you’ve listened along, you’ll no doubt agree that this is a sparkling album. Really special.

When you listen to a lot of Japanese music from this era, be that the early rumblings of City Pop, the spacey rock music, or the Jazz Fusion that all the kids like these days (no, they do! I swear), Douji Morita seems a total iconoclast. In an era rife for bright, optimistic music, she stands apart doing her own thing.

I think relistening to this album, I’m reminded of a Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500) interview I heard this morning. Wareham says: “we still appeal to sad teenagers,” of G500’s ever-growing fanbase. He eventually muses, though, that it is not the sadness that has this enduring appeal, but the total peacefulness that the music has, because of its all-bearing forlorn nature.

I think that’s what appeals to me most about ‘A Boy’ – it might be a heartbreak album, but – it is so peaceful. If ever there was an album to run yourself a hot bath to, at the end of a long and cold day, it is this one.