Chocolate Lips – Foolish Girl (English Translation)

Continuing with the theme of “cool songs I found by virtue of being an anime-obsessed teenager”, I have another one for you today. I’ve linked the song at the bottom of this post. This one doesn’t actually appear in an anime, but I found it thanks to the stylishly-done, but ultimately pointless one-shot “California Crisis: Gun Salvo” (カリフォルニア· クライシス：追撃の銃火 kariforunia kuraishisu: tsuigeki no juuka). To give whoever made this credit, they did at least attempt to come up with a plot, but as California Crisis isn’t based on a manga, they didn’t have any source material to go off. Also, since this was the mid-80s, they were probably trying to get the job done quickly so they could go clubbing wearing suits and get high on economic success. In a similar vein to To-Y, the result is a 45-minute outing that doesn’t really go anywhere or say anything, but it’s worth watching just for the music and the unique high-contrast art style. Presumably the budget went into those rather than the writing!

The soundtrack features four funky tracks with vocals by Fujiwara Miho (藤原美穂), a singer who’s been in a few different groups over the years. Since I enjoyed the California Crisis soundtrack so much, I went looking to see what else Miho had done and found that one of these groups was Chocolate Lips, a collaboration between Japanese and American musicians. They released a solitary self-titled funk/soul album back in 1984. Although the whole album is good fun, the standout track for me is “Foolish Girl”, a chill R&B-esque number with a really nice electric guitar solo and smooth sax riffs. I’ve been listening to this one for years, but when I first heard it around 2009, I couldn’t find any lyrics, so I couldn’t even Google Translate them for an approximation of what the song was about. Thanks to city pop’s recent explosion in popularity, a lot more people have become interested in this kind of music, so more information is available online now. I have provided a translation below.

Thank you very much to ninni97 on LyricsTranslate who provided the Japanese lyrics. As they’ve noted here, the official lyrics are written as 5:00PM and 10:00PM, but Miho sings 五時 (goji, 5 o’clock) and 十時 (juuji, 10 o’clock) without regard for the time of day.

This was a pretty simple one to translate since there’s only really one verse, a pre-chorus, and a bridge in Japanese, and then the refrain is in English. Nonetheless, I was tripped up right at the start by the first line. Who’s been telling lies? Japanese likes to omit the subject where we’d include it in English, so it’s hard to tell. Presumably the singer is the one who spread the lies, but I think she could be saying that someone else did it – perhaps her former lover, as the tone of the lyrics is melancholy. I’ve left out the subject in my translation to keep it ambiguous. Hopefully this works, as English songs often do the same to make the lyrics fit with the rhythm.

なくしたての恋 (nakushi tate no koi) at the end of the first verse also confused me. Just what is that て doing there? At first I wondered if it was a contracted って or an archaic form to make the line fit the rhythm, but I believe the answer is that 立て is functioning as a suffix here, meaning the action has just been completed. I somehow haven’t noticed this before and it isn’t in my grammar book, but my dictionary very helpfully gives 生まれたて (umaretate, “newborn”) and 焼きたて (yakitate, “freshly made”) as two other examples of the pattern. The singer literally says she’s “just lost [her] love”, but this doesn’t sound right to me in English as “losing” someone can mean they died, so I’ve translated it as “my heart just got broken”.

Another challenge was what to call グラビアページ (gurabia peeji) in English. Gravure is a kind of photography for men’s magazines which features glamour models in underwear or bikinis. If you’ve ever visited a convenience store in Japan, you’ve probably seen some of these magazines on display, although I hear they were quietly phased out around the time of the Tokyo Olympics. Or perhaps they just don’t sell as well any more – similar publications in the UK have pretty much all gone bust (no pun intended), and this is a song from over 40 years ago. I’d probably call them porn magazines or dirty magazines in English, but this is maybe a bit strong because from what I gather gravure doesn’t usually feature nudity. ページ also implies these are just a few photo pages within a larger publication (maybe a magazine like Playboy with articles as well as photos of women), but if I translate it as “Page Three”, this is too UK-specific and thankfully doesn’t exist any more. I think “girlie magazines” is a good compromise. It’s slightly euphemistic, but the lyrics in the bridge paint a picture of the kind of sleazy late-night café that would have these mags lying around.

Lastly, I find it really convenient that Japanese has a word for the pose where you sit with your elbow(s) on a surface and rest your chin on one or both hands, such as you might do if you’re tired, bored, or fed up: 頬杖 (hoozue). Sadly we don’t have an equivalent in English and have to resort to saying an entire sentence to convey the meaning. I wonder if any other languages have a specific name for it.

Thank you for reading if you got this far, and the song is linked below if you fancy a listen. Please feel free to share any comments or corrections.