An overture, an airport, and a reprise give this 1990 album a structure in which movement can look back.
DO AWAY arrived on April 21, 1990, an awkwardly useful date for an album now approached through City Pop. It falls just beyond the decade so often used as the style’s ready-made frame. That small chronological inconvenience is productive: musical relationships do not stop when a calendar acquires a new leading digit. The record offers a way to follow those relationships forward rather than patrol a border. Its place in an atlas can remind us that a category is most useful when it helps us notice continuities, and least useful when it decides in advance which continuities are permitted to count.
The eleven titles describe a sequence with a threshold and a return. End of the winter is explicitly marked as an overture; Airport appears partway through, then comes back at the end as Airport(Reprise). These are facts of the printed program, not a proposed summary of the lyrics. They nevertheless invite a reading of the album as organized movement. An overture asks us to enter; a reprise asks us to recognize something again after time has passed. Between them, arrival is not necessarily the opposite of departure. The same named place can acquire another meaning because our position within the sequence has changed.
Kadomatsu’s producer credit gives that sequence an important point of coordination, while the individual credits resist collapsing its making into one person. Shingo Kobayashi and Yoshiyuki Asano also appear among the arrangers; Imai writes the words to Airport. The significance lies in the precision of the division, rather than in a competition over who deserves the largest name. An album can possess coherence without requiring uniform authorship. Here the credit sheet is an invitation to imagine a shared working space: different contributions can remain distinguishable while helping a single singer sustain the record’s identity across changing titles and responsibilities.
Its later physical history makes the question of structure even more tangible. The 2021 two-LP edition distributes the eleven tracks across four sides. The short closing reprise is therefore separated from Airport by both intervening tracks and the handling of another record. This does not establish how every listener experiences the album, and it does not make vinyl a guarantee of attention. It simply offers a different arrangement of pauses. A work first released in the CD era can acquire new physical punctuation decades later. Returning to it on another medium means encountering not only a familiar sequence, but another way of making time around that sequence.
The travel vocabulary should not tempt us to invent a journey taken by Imai, or to treat Phuket and an airport as proof of one particular lifestyle. Titles can make geography available as imagination without supplying a passport record. What matters in this reading is the relation between moving on and coming back. The album’s name appears to push away; its final title makes room for recurrence. Those directions can coexist. A record can open toward elsewhere while keeping something recognizable within reach. DO AWAY becomes especially suggestive when approached at that scale: not as evidence that an entire era lived effortlessly, but as a carefully bounded space in which departure and return can belong to the same experience.