Hitomi Tohyama’s third album leaves a door between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Next door is a peculiarly urban distance: close enough to share a wall, far enough not to know who lives behind it. Hitomi Tohyama’s third album, NEXT DOOR, released in 1983, makes that ordinary position its title. The official sequence opens with Exotic Yokogao and ends with Our Lovely Days. An exotic profile and days belonging to us sit within the same list. At least in the language of the titles, unfamiliarity and familiarity do not have to be mutually exclusive choices.
That threshold is a useful place to consider the everyday scale of popular music. Urban culture need not begin with a panoramic skyline. It can start with a profile, sunglasses being removed, or a relationship addressed as yesterday. Titles are not evidence that particular events happened; they are choices about how experience will be named. Beside the grand declaration of a metropolis, NEXT DOOR retains a degree of social restraint. It points to an adjacent place without deciding whether the listener ought to knock.
The door was subsequently opened another way. Nippon Columbia’s official announcement records Night Tempo’s 2024 reworking of the opening song. This verifiable continuation need not be enlarged into a tale in which an entire album abruptly changes its destiny. It already shows an older work becoming material for new work, with the original and the reworking occupying distinct moments. A name being raised again can introduce listeners while also giving them a reason to establish exactly which version first brought them there.
NEXT DOOR thus offers two forms of proximity: the geographical adjacency of its name and the temporal adjacency that a new version can create for an older recording. Neither amounts to automatic intimacy; the particular work still needs to be encountered. On a City Pop map, it is worth keeping the door at its original scale instead of immediately converting an ordinary building into a skyscraper. A distinctive opening may draw somebody close; the complete album leaves room to decide how long to stay. A neighbor’s value can lie in being nearby without having become something we assume we already know.