Junko Yagami's FULL MOON gives grandeur and ordinary life the same evening.
A full moon is good at making people look up; breakfast brings them back to the table. Junko Yagami's FULL MOON accommodates both scales. Beside its title song stands “Heartbreak Hotel de Chōshoku o.” Released on December 5, 1983, the album need not make human life a flawless circle simply because it has chosen a complete celestial object for its name. An expansive light can share the program with a meal somebody still has to eat. Romance then concerns not only the disappearance of ordinary life, but the ways ordinary life insists on remaining.
This is not a new singer's tentative introduction. Yagami made her professional debut with “Omoide wa Utsukushisugite” in 1978, and her official discography places LONELY GIRL, Koi no Smash Hit, and FULL MOON in 1983. That sequence need not be inflated into a legend about creative energy. It provides a position: here is another complete program from somebody already working continuously, within a year containing other substantial statements. Getting to know it can begin with differences between works rather than a hurried attempt to summarize the whole period in one phrase.
“NATURALLY” and “Tasogare no BAY CITY” sit together on FULL MOON, with “Hidamari no Anata” and “Cotton Snow and Paper Stars” elsewhere in the program. Nature, city, sunshine, and manufactured stars do not all submit to the same source of light. A paper star is particularly suggestive. It lacks a real star's distance, but someone can make it by hand. The titles open a world in which natural and artificial things can coexist. Brightness need not come exclusively from the sky; it can result from somebody's arrangement.
Fullness therefore need not mean an absence of gaps. It can mean enough room: for streets and rooms, the refusal of “NO!” and the invitation of “FOLLOW ME.” Listeners who associate Yagami closely with one image of an urban evening receive a wider view. A singer need not remain beneath the same sign or keep every work lit at the same hour. Night can be magnificent, and breakfast can still arrive. The album's completeness lies in making these differences belong to one inhabited world.