MUCC - Shounen M
On 2017/07/19, this 344 pages heavy collection of interviews and pictures was released. I’m obviously not going to translate it all, but I will post summaries and quotes from some of the interviews as I get around reading them. Today, the very first one.
Miya in an interview with Ongaku to Hito in 2004
This is about writing lyrics, plus Miya's experiences with death.
The first time Miya wrote lyrics was in the first year of high school.
Danzetsu, for their first album Tsuuzetsu, was the first time he used an experience of his own as lyrics.
He ended up crying hard when they played it live.
Ever since, he often writes experiences down just as they remain in his memory for lyrics.
Danzetsu shows his vivid memory of the day his father died. He had been sick and passed when Miya was in the second year of elementary school. Miya remembers a phone call that morning, and with his mother, they went by train from Ibaraki to the hospital in Tokyo (like they would do every week). At that time, his father was dead already, but Miya didn’t understand that yet. When they got to the room, the door was unexpectedly open and the room looked bright white. Looking back, it was probably only that the sheets were changed to stark white ones and that some flowers had been put away, but Miya remembers a bright white light in that room.
He says his parents had previously made him meet the eyes of dying people, like the grandmother of a relative. They took him with them to visit her, and there he witnessed a drawn out, suffering death.
Seeing that moment of death was scary to him, but ever since he feels very calm when faced with seeing death.
He cried about his father’s death, but was very calm about all other deaths he experienced, to the point of wondering why he is that way. It’s not that he wants to grieve but can’t, it’s more an acceptance and moving forward.
Like in diary writing, he says it’s no good to just write “today this bad thing happened” but that it’s important to follow up with “but that was today, today is over and tomorrow is a new day”.
“We cannot re-do any day, any hour, any minute, any second. It all moves forward and we have to do the same”
Back to those train rides to the hospital in Tokyo, little Miya really loved trains (he still does, but apparently he was crazy about them as a kid) so he was always very excited to go to Tokyo because of the huge number of trains he could see in the big city.
When asked about the feelings leading to Kugatsu mikka no kokuin, Miya said it came from thinking about "a life". He wanted to write about something like that for a long time, and when he finally wrote kugatsu mikka no kokuin it took no time at all.
Something like in the lyrics actually happened, and it’s something he never wants to forget, so he tried to immortalize the memory by making it into a song. The same is true for both Danzetsu and Bouzenjishitsu.
In the process of bringing those memories into the open (= writing them down as lyrics), he has an honest talk with himself about the experiences. About how he was when they happened, and how he thinks about them now. It’s in the past so there is no changing it, but he must not forget about it, so he talks with himself about it.
“I have always been able to express unpleasant things, but lately I started to want to be someone able to express all things about living in an honest manner”, both happy and unhappy things, and everything in between. He’s not there yet, but that’s what he strives to become.