I imagine y’all have been in the same position I’ve been. How do you quantify why something makes you feel a certain way? As I look at my open tabs. As I revisit barely-visited YouTube videos. As I go over notes and drafts — I stop and think. As I listen to MariMari’s 耳と目そしてエコー (Ears and Eyes, Then Echo) I get overcome by a deep yearning, a nostalgia for a time I richly remember, even if our stories aren’t the same. If history is just a curated collection of snapshots, her album captures something from a time that deeply resonated with me.
It was in that offbeat, alternative, post-grunge era, that one Mari Nakazato came to be as a musician. For all who might have known of her name before, most likely, it’s been due to her appearance in a certain Japanese band’s lore. It was Mari who was the girlfriend of Fishmans founder and lead singer, Shinji Sato.
Shinji first got wind of Mari when she lent her voice to a jingle played on Shinji Sato and Daisuke Kawasaki’s アザラシアワー・ニジマスナイト (Seal Hour: Rainbow Trout Night) radio show, a groundbreaking broadcast program, similar to a British pirate radio show, that served as a way to both promote Fishmans and to introduce Japanese audiences to both homegrown and foreign alt-rock, reggae, and R&B. When they first met in person in autumn of 1992, on the set of their King Master George cover photoshoot, it was Shinji who made the first move, asking to borrow her dog to take some pictures. Kindred spirits, they shortly became romantically and creatively involved, until Shinji left us all in 1999.
For Fishmans fans, it was this love between those two that inspired Shinji to write one of his most beloved songs, “いかれたBaby,” appearing on 1993’s Neo Yankees’ Holiday. A gorgeous mix of dub and alt-R&B, it sounds like a precursor to the ideas that would surface in their most critically acclaimed work shortly thereafter — songs indebted to Shinji’s new frame of mind. And in that milieu of love, Shinji seemed determined to make a certain dream come true for Mari.
Offering a snapshot of just how much her life changed after this fateful meeting was a short interview Mari gave to Kaji Hideki for Space Shower TV’s “Speak Out”. In it, Mari (a Gen-Xer) relates how as a young high schooler she knew she always wanted to be a singer and create songs. However, Mari understood her limitations. She knew she couldn’t play an instrument, nor did she know anyone who could help her suss out those songs. In those days, it was the influence of English New Wave and Japan’s neo-acoustic music, a precursor to the Shibuya-kei scene, that played a role in developing her musical taste.
Shinji would help jumpstart Mari’s musical career by putting together — and appearing under an alias in — a short-lived band dubbed MariMari Rhythmkiller Machinegun in 1994. Together in 1995 they released the single “Since Yesterday,” featuring two covers of the Scottish duo Strawberry Switchblade. Then a year later, they switched gears, setting aside her much more aggro-sounding debut for something more soulful, closer to the dreamier and sexier sound Mari imagined singing.
MariMari’s “Everyday, Under The Blue Blue Sky” released in 1996 would feature a large contingent of Fishmans members and re-establish Mari herself as a different kind of artist. Less indebted to the prevailing Shibuya-kei sound, its tonal shift seemingly leads us into more soulful, looser, one would say “baggier” sounds, coinciding with Fishmans’ own increasingly Shimokitazawa-esque leanings where vintage trappings drew from different cultural bins.
What would follow next for Mari would be a slow drip of guest spots and singles, appearing as a backup singer on Fishmans’ Long Season released in 1996, and then later that same year following up with the “Indian Summer” single serving to promote what would become her full-length album debut, 耳と目そしてエコー (Ears and Eyes, Then Echo). And although signed to a major label, For Life Records, Mari chose to record in the comfort of Fishmans’ own Waikiki Beach studio where Kuchu Camp and Long Season had been recorded. Following the lead of Shinji, whose love of scratch demos and lofi tapes led to new songs, Mari took the reins of her own music.
Mari spoke in her Space Shower TV interview of Shinji giving her the space to take ownership of her music. Case in point: where earlier maxi-singles and sessions were led by arrangements created by others, the bulk of 耳と目そしてエコー (Ears and Eyes, Then Echo) was woodshedded by Mari on piano, with sessions only serving to flesh out her arrangements. Unlike working at a huge professional studio, Shinji’s Waikiki Beach recording studio had all the makings of a bedroom studio, allowing Mari to really feel comfortable to work at her speed and to work within the limitations of what the studio had to offer.
耳と目そしてエコー (Ears and Eyes, Then Echo) was recorded in the middle of Fishmans’ masterful “Setagaya” trilogy. In hindsight, you can hear its spirit appearing in those recordings.
A commercial promoting Mari’s album finds her sister, Shinji, and Mari herself renting a car and simply going around that sprawling Tokyo suburb with videocam in hand, doing what young adults do, vibing out, and showing us Mari’s more candid side. It’s a wonderful three-minute-long ’90s Japanese slice of life that finds them trying to navigate a car wash, skateboarding around Setagaya’s more industrial parts, and blasting hip-hop on their car stereo, improvising some choreography to film alongside it. In a pre-TikTok era, Mari chose to present herself as not your run-of-the-mill J-Pop idol but as a young woman with all her strengths and quirks.
As for the album itself, its lead singles — “Everyday, Under the Blue Blue Sky” and the December-released “Indian Summer” — paint a partial picture. While the latter track sort of belongs to the Fiona Apple school of edgy alterna-pop, and the former speaks of the more romantic side of the record, it would be hard to say that either represented the totality of Mari’s ideas. Album opener “Night Birdy” reminds me of the territory Radiohead, Massive Attack, and others like PJ Harvey were exploring, using downtempo as a means to tweak rock and pop music. That it took Mari twelve hours to get a piano part right meant that Shinji was there patiently to see it through.
There’s a special kind of intimate production that Shinji’s added to the record that Mari would not have been able to replicate anywhere else. When the record was released in 1997, much like Fishmans’ own 宇宙 日本 世田谷 (Uchu Nippon Setagaya), it seemed it should have formed part of a new zeitgeist; instead, it languished in obscurity, largely found in the cutout bins of Japanese record stores a year or so later.
Although there’s the presence of all the members of Fishmans in peak form, a “delicate sound you want to play at full volume” as Tower Records put it when they reissued it on vinyl recently, one really doesn’t have to skip that far down the tracklist — on tracks like “FEEL LIKE A GRASS, TOUCH OF GRASS” or “tonight I♡m yours” — to see how a lot of this record feels like an intimate conversation between Shinji and herself. And where the hazy, dreamy, dubby atmosphere of the record is left to Mari’s own devices, as in “sunrise sunset – naked version -“, she creates truly moving music that’s uniquely her own, sounding like a precursor to some latent form of future pop that, history would show, she’d have to leave behind.
What’s left of history, of course, is her story. After one further single — 1998’s “J,” which traded Shinji’s bedroom for polished session players and a bigger studio — she stepped away from solo music and toward modeling. Then in March 1999, Shinji untimely passed away. Shortly thereafter, Mari would go back to reform MariMari Rhythmkiller Machinegun with players from the Fishmans orbit, before life happened, something else took over her days, and her career turned elsewhere.
It would be nearly a decade later, for the soundtrack to Iguchi Nami’s 2008 film 人のセックスを笑うな, that MariMari returned to sing “いかれたBaby” over a lovers-rock arrangement by former Fishmans keyboardist Hakase-Sun, in what many might have read as an answer record ten years deferred. Her voice, relaxed and certain, replying to a melody addressed to her by someone no longer there to hear her reply — it may be the gentlest moment in the entire Fishmans extended universe, and perhaps a capstone for her to move on to her new something else. Now, many years later, with Mari living her best life now, I wonder about something else.
When Eiji from Revelation Time pulled this CD out of a huge stack of them for me to check out, I asked him why. You might not know it but Mari helped secure the rights to a lot of the tracks you heard on his compilations like Virtual Dreams II: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999, and as a big Fishmans fan I couldn’t help but want to hear the connection. Now I understand. Perhaps it’s our turn to circle back and rediscover Mari’s own story, and find our way to regift her life’s work by affirming we haven’t forgotten hers?
Leave a Reply