Two composer-led sides, and the different responsibilities through which Omura and Sakurada connect them.
My Dear is organized around an unusually legible proposition: give each side of a Junko Sakurada album to a different composer, and let the performer connect the results. Victor dates the original release to 5 November 1981 and assigns side A to Akiko Yano and side B to Yuichiro Oda. That division makes the LP’s physical format part of the musical argument. Turning the record would have introduced a change in compositional authorship without changing the singer. The album is therefore more specific than a general encounter between idol pop and singer-songwriter culture. It sets two identifiable writing practices within one deliberately bounded programme.
The first five titles are “Watashi wa Okubyomono,” “Kitto Kitto,” “Nazeka Tamerai,” “MY DEAR” and “Setsuna Tic.” Read simply as titles, without treating them as a continuous plot, they suggest a vocabulary of hesitation, insistence and personal address. The title track sits inside the side rather than opening or closing it. This arrangement makes the album’s name one moment in a larger sequence, not a declaration that must govern every subsequent song. Yano’s composing credit supplies continuity across the five pieces, but does not mean that she wrote every lyric. Keeping those jobs separate makes the collaboration more precise.
Oda’s half begins with “Me Ma I,” followed by “With You,” “Misty,” “This Is a Boogie” and “Show Me.” Two previously issued singles occupy the latter part of that sequence: “Misty” arrived in June, and “This Is a Boogie” in September. The November album consequently brings public songs into a new set of relationships instead of presenting only unheard material. Placement matters: the singles do not simply open the record as an advertisement. They sit within a composer’s five-song span, allowing listeners who knew them individually to encounter the surrounding work and recognize a larger area of shared authorship.
Arrangement offers another level of continuity. Victor’s 2024 overview describes Masaaki Omura as arranging almost the whole record, while Tower’s track-level listing credits him throughout the ten-song original programme. The broader wording and the individual entries are preserved rather than silently harmonized. What can safely be said is that Omura’s role crosses the Yano–Oda division. A composer supplies the song’s writing identity; an arranger works on its recorded presentation. An album built around two composers can therefore also depend on a recurring third musical responsibility. This is a useful corrective to histories that imagine each writer’s contribution arriving as an entirely self-contained world.
The closing song complicates the picture further. Tower credits Sakurada herself with the words to “Show Me,” Oda with its music and Omura with its arrangement. At the end of an album often discussed through its two composers, the singer enters the writing credits. That fact does not require a story of sudden liberation from outside authors. It shows several kinds of contribution coexisting within a single project. Performing other people’s songs and writing one’s own words are not mutually exclusive identities. The closer leaves the album with a particularly concrete example of their intersection, rather than resolving the whole record into a single author’s signature.
The selected edition is the 14-track UHQCD VICL-77057, released on 3 July 2024. Its ten original tracks are followed by “Tamanegi Muitara,” “Kanashimi no Prelude,” “Koi wa SEE-SAW” and the single version of “Setsuna Tic.” The additions restore a wider view of Sakurada’s 1981 single activity. They also require care with sequence: track five is explicitly the album version of “Setsuna Tic,” while track fourteen returns to the single version. This is a documented difference in programme identity, not an assertion about how the recordings sound. The additional songs belong to the reissue’s historical apparatus, after the original conclusion.
An earlier expanded edition, VICL-62528, contained seventeen tracks, adding three karaoke selections beyond those four songs. Victor dates that CD to November 2007, while Billboard Japan and Tower catalogue entries show May 2008 for the same number. The discrepancy remains visible; neither date should become the album’s 1981 release date. More importantly, the two expanded programmes offer different ways of encountering the material. One extends the singles archive with accompaniment versions; the 2024 edition emphasizes four vocal bonuses and a newly presented album. More tracks do not automatically define a more authentic album, because an edition and an original programme answer different questions.
The 2024 context is itself historical evidence. CDJournal placed the reissue alongside Ann Lewis, Iyo Matsumoto, Mamiko Aso & Captain and Aru Takamura in Victor’s Female City Pop series. This grouping gives My Dear a new neighbourhood, organized partly through retrospective interest in writers and arrangements. It is valuable precisely when it leads back to the album’s particular construction. Yano’s side, Oda’s side, Omura’s recurring role and Sakurada’s closing lyric are not interchangeable examples of a fashionable sound. Together they describe a concrete project in which the singer coordinates differences. The record’s lasting interest lies in those relationships, while its successive editions show how later listeners have been invited to notice them.