Some notes on Genki’s Zankyo
I didn’t want to write notes in the lyrics post just in case he looks at it, since he is aware I translate his stuff. It just feels so awkward :’) But I did want to write something, because I know that he can’t talk about it himself and therefore won’t talk about it or explain it to anyone. It would take me several pages to explain just how this song is connected to so many other things he wrote, but I’ll try to be brief. First, not only is this song named Echo, just using the Japanese word for it, but it also uses a lot of words and expressions that appear in Mejibray’s Echo, too. This might be harder to notice in translation, but there are some phrases which are the same, and there are several lines which definitely remind of each other. Obviously, the songs are connected. I would call them related or parallel songs, though Zankyo is a lot shorter and the wording seems more distant. It also seems to have one level of meaning (with allusions to others), whereas Echo had about 3 levels (in my opinion). The concept of Mejibray’s Echo seemed to center on the present being an echo of the past. The way I saw that song, it was like this web of reverberating things… the past echoing in the present, relationships from the past influencing his present feelings, then the expectations of others echoing through him, and then his own self and his words/creations echoing to their fans. It even included an “echo” to the song Kore wo izon to yobu nara with the lines “I’ll become whatever you wish me to be” and an allusion to it with the phrase “an echo of co-dependency.” This, I believe, was supposed to both recall a past co-dependent relationship and refer to the co-dependent relationship with fans (or rather, the attention from them that he craved & the attention from him that fans wanted, and that entire cycle of co-dependency). The new song, Zankyo, to me feels like an echo of the song Echo both linguistically and content-wise, but because it is an “echo of an echo,” it seems more distant and hollow and simple, while still strongly referencing so many things. In the very beginning, there are the motifs he often used: rain falling (metaphor for sadness and tears), past he’s turned away from, and the “little box”. All of those are clearly still alive and well. I think it’s pretty obvious that it alludes to what happened with Mejibray, too, making it another echo, in a way. It refers obliquely to the loss that occurred, and the fact that it became a source of trauma is mentioned a second time (the first time was in Bookshelf). Considering the fact that this song was written after 8P-SB announced their hiatus, I think it is referencing that, too. The part of the song that starts with “I love you,” is particularly heartbreaking, as it references the whole of Mejibray’s opus. A long time ago, at the very start, he has said that everything he writes is a love song in some way. In the beginning, there were definitely songs referencing someone loved and lost. Then it turned into “Love me?”, that phrase which he used constantly, and has mentioned so often how he wants to be loved. That question “I was…loved?” is just heartbreaking in that context. And finally, Zankyo references something I could see, but which he hasn’t confirmed until recently. It’s the fact that he’s been trying hard to repress a part of himself and trying to be positive and “pretend to smile,” but it hasn’t really been working. The fact that this song came out just a little before he started his new project (SpelL), the name of which directly references the kanji 綴 which he used for Tsuzuku, is very interesting. We’ll see what happens in the subsequent songs…
