Susumu Hirasawa is a Japanese musician with a very strange musical style. Most simply, he’s an electronica musician, but he uses a lot of different instruments and equipment, including lasers and things he’s built himself.
For reference, his live performances look like this:
Incidentally, he’s also the namesake of Yui Hirasawa from K-On! — as in the case of Ya Boy Kongming!, that’s part of the title, not punctuation in the sentence…
He had a whole thing — that I’m 97% sure he deliberately exaggerated for humour — on Twitter when he learned about that.
He’s had a pretty good career within Japan, releasing about 17 studio albums and about the same number of soundtracks, mostly for anime. Outside of Japan, he’s probably best-known for the anime soundtracks, especially the 1997 Berserk anime, especially Forces.
Among his anime soundtrack songs is “The Girl in Byakkoya.” While a version of the song — just called Byakkokya — is the title track on his 2006 album Byakkoya – White Tiger Field, the version of the song known as The Girl in Byakkokya was also included in 2006 anime movie Paprika.
The former version has lyrics that make reference to Vietnam — due to the White Tiger Field being an oil field off the coast of Vietnam, while the later has slightly different lyrics and additional female locals.
“Byakkoya” is Japanese for “White Tiger“, referring to one of the four guardian gods presiding over the four directions in East Asian mythology — Byakkoya being the associated with the West, the Autumn, the dusk, and the element of Metal in East Asian philosophy.
“White Tiger” is, as established, also the name of an oil field off the coast of Vietnam. This is what the song is named for, and, if you squint, you can see how the lyrics about fire and noises in the distance evoke oil platforms.
On the other hand, within Paprika, it serves more or less as the theme song of Paprika herself. Without getting sidetracked too much by explaining the plot, Paprika is the digital avatar a psychiatrist uses to enter the dreams of her patients to help them overcome trauma.
It’s a bit like anime Inception, though that’s selling way short how weird a movie Paprika is, even compared to Inception.
But, like, it’s a Satoshi Kon movie. “Weird” was basically his whole thing.
Given that Paprika literally serves as a guide-type character, the lyrics clearly fit her character and her interactions with the other characters:
“I followed a girl who showed me the way,
Lyrics via musixmatch.
an incantation of the shimmering haze.
And high upon the hill appeared
the nameless field I’d yearned for.”
(There doesn’t seem to be an official English translation,
so the available translations vary wildly.)
Like basically every other Susumu Hirasawa song, “The Girl in Byakkoya” is hard to pin down musically and even place in a genre. But it’s a fascinating listen:
The official Music to Write Realmgard to playlist has been updated to include this latest entry:
And follow me here:
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
