Akina Nakamori

Picture the context. It's 1986, Akina Nakamori, one of the brightest stars of new Japanese pop, is at the peak of her popularity, songwriters and producers are competing to write tailor-made pieces for her voice (just two years earlier the legendary Yosui Inoue had penned for her the equally epochal "Kazari ja nai no ya namida wa", one of the most covered songs in Japanese music), she's a style icon and her attitude, elegant and rebellious at once, makes her a point of reference for hundreds of thousands of teenagers. She is the crown jewel of the increasingly feverish idol industry (matched only by her "beloved rival" Seiko Matsuda), every new release of hers is an instant hit, but behind the flawless image and the adoring legions of fans lies an iron will, an expressive fire that pushes her results well beyond those of a disposable product. With a one-two punch of albums such as "Bitter And Sweet" and "D404ME", the then-twenty-year-old was already paving the way towards a full awareness of her own means, complicating her output with more varied arrangements and a pervasive sophistication in her performances. The following year, things get even more interesting.

It's 1986, as mentioned, Nakamori is fresh off her first Song of the Year win at the Japan Record Awards (Japan's equivalent of the Grammys), her voice has gained depth and maturity, and even forays into sonic territories that once seemed beyond her reach no longer seem so far-fetched. For a popstar at the peak of her powers, this can mean two things: keep to the safe, tried-and-tested path, or use the moment to shake up the whole game and offer something truly subversive. A dilemma many in the position of the still very young singer have had to answer, one that the twenty-one-year-old responds to in the most surprising way possible.

Already announced in March, shortly after the release of her instant-classic "Desire – Jounetsu", the title alone – "Fushigi" (trans. "mystery", "wonder") – hinted that for her ninth album Nakamori wanted to present herself in a bolder guise, as elusive and unclassifiable as the deepest darkness. And everything, at least until its release several months later, would indeed remain truly obscure. The singer, together with a tight-knit team of collaborators, shuts herself away in the studio, decides to take charge of the production of the entire record herself (a genuinely unique move in the glittering idol world) and works for months on its tracks, reshuffling the originally circulated tracklist more than once. Released in stores on August 11th, the project would immediately reveal its bizarre mysteries.

Legend has it that many buyers of the record, right after listening to it, tried to return their copy to the store, thinking it was defective. Whatever the truth of the matter, the reaction to "Fushigi" remains one of astonishment and bewilderment, towards an album that utterly disavows every approach taken up to that point, presenting a completely transformed performer. If the chosen title wasn't revealing enough, the cover art drives home the stark departure from all her previous work. Wrapped in a cloak as black as a Bene Gesserit out of Herbert's imagination, only the left half of her face lit by a faint glow, Akina Nakamori presents herself to us with the features of a ghost, a voice dissolved beneath blankets of fog disturbing the senses and reality itself. With the holy card of Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" tucked in her pocket – a record that had made a huge impression in Japan too, at the time of the release of "The Exorcist" – the singer and her backing band (Eurox, a wave quartet with a marked dreamlike sensibility) overturn all the stereotypes associated with the nascent idol aesthetic (a voice, often shrill, pushed to the front, bright arrangements, lyrics usually shifting between the romantic and the harmless) and bring out its creeping dark underside, its gothic potential, lost among banks of reverb and unsettling shadow moons.

Reverb: the founding word of the whole operation, the bone of contention that so thoroughly upended audience expectations. Determined to amplify the aura of mystery as much as possible, to hide behind the veils of a perception that is all too often deceptive, Nakamori breaks the pact with her audience and treats her voice – the instrument that had showcased her charm and elegance – as just another texture complementing the rest of the arrangement. And so, during mixing, we find her asking Eurox to redo the whole thing because the entire record, however captivating, didn't sound eccentric enough for her liking: she therefore employs a reverb-laden vocoder and layers her voice (or rather, her voices) behind blankets of cotton wool. The second mix hits the mark perfectly, turning the human element into an ectoplasm, a mere memory of what it's trying to express. It's understandable that those who bought the record, expecting to hear the same artist who only a few months earlier had released a vibrant power-pop essay in the shape of "Desire", might have suspected a pressing fault; understandable, too, that such a decision, combined with the choice to release the whole album without any advance singles, would provoke a certain amount of dissonance.

Setting aside the initial widespread bewilderment, the "Fushigi" project goes well beyond a mere production gimmick, situating itself within a cultural humus that intercepts and synthesises territories still irreconcilable at the time, while also anticipating the syncretic attitude that would characterise the entire j-pop scene over the following two decades. Because it's still pop, after all: dark, thunderous, at times evanescent in its ethereal consistency, but never sacrificing its melodic nature, its popular communicability. If anything, it complicates it, placing it within a current that leads Nakamori and Eurox to a crowded crossroads, animated by the dreamlike earthquake of 4AD, the emerging national gothic movement, globalist influences and funk, viewed however through a lens that distorts its features. A complex marriage, handled from the very start with a steady hand and full awareness: already with its opener "Back Door Night" it demonstrates a finely tuned production ear, effortlessly coordinating volumes and registers, driving bass and synthesizers forward to outline a grandiose flight into the unknown. Beneath it, Nakamori's voice proceeds through lyrical ellipses, the spectre of a woman who abandoned her earthly form long ago: where there was once order and charm, there is now a distant sense of despair, an ever more urgent invitation to surrender, turning into a sinister lament. And what follows is certainly no less striking.

As if torn from an ancient nightmare, "New Generation" advances on tight drumming, straight out of the perfect gothic manual, wringing out fragments of meaning where meaning itself ceases to exist. Nakamori becomes the officiant of an arcane ritual, the synthesizers ringing out like harpsichords, beneath a possessed vocal chase that, by the close, turns raw and feral. The dreams grow even more unsettling: "Marionette" boasts the undeniable power of its arrangement and the unstable nostalgia of its vocal, led towards places only memory can reach. In its cinematic flow, softened by the mournful melody of a violin, lies the anticipation of much of the visual-kei that in later years would rely on similar neoclassical blends to express its own sense of abandonment.

Even stripped of its darker accents, the story is no less overwhelming. As if immortalising a lost paradise, "Genwaku sarete" rests entirely on a free-roaming bassline that weaves through the exotic interlocking of synthesizers, lifted wholesale from the most evocative ambient music, as if to dwell on an abandonment now made concrete. And so the rhythmic jolts of "Glass no kokoro" (trans. "the heart of glass") bounce like crystal beads around a voice lost in the mystery of love. But woe betide anyone looking for any trace of the twenty-year-old from the year before: illusion quickly turns into bitter reality.

Between spectral funky choruses (“Wait For Me”) and murky farewell declarations (the torrid percussion that defines “Okibi”), “Teen-Age Blue” shines as the masterpiece within the masterpiece, the track that best sums up the many directions taken by the album. A play of contrasts and atmospheres, the song digs its claws into its complex synthetic framework, casting a diffuse light on melodic content that is pure rapture. Captivating in its evanescence, explosive in its rhythmic drive with a faint dub aftertaste, it harmonizes instrumental impetus with the ghostly forms of the voice, sealing a union between ethereal wave and pop rapture that has rarely achieved such happy results. 

And Akina Nakamori would never achieve similar results again: although the album landed yet another number-one spot on the charts, holding it for three weeks (an unrepeated feat for an album with these sounds), the general bewilderment and the slight dip in sales — still quite respectable — did nothing to help sustain such an artistic direction. This led to an abrupt production shift in her subsequent projects, not necessarily lower in quality (the immediately following “Crimson” stands out as one of the finest examples of Japanese-style sophisti-pop) but certainly lacking the courage that defined “Fushigi”.

Nevertheless, the mystery of 1986 allowed an entire pop scene to confront its own potential, to identify different paths (paths that would prove extremely useful in the decades to come, decisive in the birth of the entire alt-idol system), to fearlessly combine ambition, sophistication and commercial success. Faced with the unknown, an idol proved ready to embrace the challenge.

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21/12/2025