Steeped in a faded heat-haze;
A garden of evergreens, adorned with darkness;
Small electric lights which sway —
Come morning, it will all be a transient… ephemeral dream
Who can an unaddressed letter be opened for?
Even if it vanishes, the loneliness doesn’t disappear
With both my sullied hands I wanted to hold it,
Hold the tender pain
Human who has the same pain.
They meet at hidden place of usual day called
“electric eden.”
The city streets grow light, even if I raise my eyebrows;
Someone’s tomorrow is going to change
Find me
Find me
“I’m waiting here for my time together with you.”
The interval of fantasy and mystery
In Center-gai, where we lost our way ¹
Trembling…
Swaying… ²
.
NOTES / INTERPRETATION:
Blue font indicates text originally written in English in the official booklet.
oo1a. Center-gai (センター街) denotes a specific central area in Shibuya, Tokyo. If you look up the name in parenthesis in Google Images, you can get an even better sense of the sparse imagery in the lyrics above.
oo1b. In considering the earlier lines in English “they meet at hidden place”, this line could either be interpreted in a first-person singular point of view, or in a first-person plural point of view (in Japanese, singular/plural is not specified here, but English requires that specificity). I went with plural, but I imagine that the speaker is in a crowd yet alone at this point, possibly lost in thought or memory. After all, the title is “dream”.
oo2. In the original Japanese, the two last words (trembling, swaying) are the same word. It is an onomatopoeia which can point to many actions, so I chose two different English words for the translation. Like the rest of the lyrics, the ending of the song is incredibly vague and leaves you just with a faint impression, nothing more, of what has occurred. The lyrics read like a fever dream, or a vision of reality under an altered state of mind (trembling and swaying due to alcohol, drugs, or depression, for instance), and so the ending could hint at that. But there are other possibilities, too. The ending could also be translated as Flickering, which could call to mind the flickering of a screen (i.e. virtual reality). The trembling and swaying could easily carry a sexual connotation too. The beauty of these lyrics is in the way their mood is so incredibly well-crafted, while still maintaining an openness of interpretation of the details.
Thoughts. This song was originally composed by Saga, and is not only one of my favourite songs in general, but also one of my favourite sets of lyrics that Show has written. The imagery is very strong but all the sentence fragments enhance the air of mystery and dreamlike quality that the music itself carries. Normally, Show gives us a story in a set of lyrics, or a strong message of some kind, but in these lyrics the focus seems to be instead just painting a picture that perfectly captures the mood of the music. No clear story, no moral, just an open, mysterious ending. Questions in a hazy-real dreamscape.
Personally, I often imagined that the speaker and the “you” that they refer were not trying to find one another in person, but in a digital place. Think texting or messaging – that is, cyberspace. If the cityscape at night or daybreak feels surreal, disjointed, flickers, it’s because that “hidden place” is where they truly live, in a strange half-dream. Of course the hidden place could also refer to an actual physical location hidden in the electric, urban jungle that is Center-gai, Shibuya.
From the vague, open-ended wording absent explicit context, to the music itself, to the deliberate situating of the song in a specific place in Tokyo, the whole feel of this song is very Japanese.
A lesser-known song and one of ALICE NINE.’s hidden gems.
.
アリス九號. ★ ALICE NINE.
夢幻ーelectric edenー
★ mugen-electric eden-
CROSS GAME (2008)
Lyrics by 将/Shou
Music by 沙我/Saga
Original text translated from Japanese.
Purchase via itunes.
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