A title returns at the end of Taeko Onuki’s album, but its position has changed.
Calling an album Cliché appears to prepare an unkind word for the reviewer in advance. Taeko Onuki’s 1982 record instead makes repetition a structure worth examining. Its sequence opens with Kuro no Clair and ends with a reprise bearing the same name. A title occurs twice, with something other than empty space between its appearances. Even on the printed list, recurrence differs from duplication. Returning to a heading need not mean returning to the position from which it was first encountered, before the intervening work had begun.
The official credits assign the opening group of arrangements to Ryuichi Sakamoto and the later group to Jean Musy. The ends of the record are therefore not simply mirror images: works by the same author unfold within different arranging relationships. Neither collaborator needs to be made the exclusive representative of a national style. The documented division of responsibility is sufficient to show how an album can accommodate different working approaches without having to erase every visible join in the interests of a supposed uniformity.
Ordinary language treats a cliché as a point at which thought stops. Recurrence in an artwork can also be an opportunity to notice again. When a title first appears, we have not passed through what lies between; when it returns, memory has acquired another layer. Understanding that change as a possibility of album structure is fairer than requiring everything to be unprecedented. Popular music has a close relationship with return. A familiar name appearing again does not automatically mean that there is no new position from which to consider it.
Within a City Pop atlas, Cliché thus offers time that is not simply a march of progress. A work can move forward and let its opening reappear; a listener can return years later without remaining the same reader. This is a possibility supplied by the form, not a claim that everybody actually experiences the music identically. Whether a familiar expression becomes merely a cliché depends partly on whether we look at it again. The modest reprise at the end resembles a mark beside a full stop, suggesting another reading.