Hiromi Iwasaki’s 1980 album places the same wish at both ends.
A wish usually points forward. A record can bend it into a circle. Hiromi Iwasaki’s WISH, released in 1980, begins and ends with Wishes in its official track listing. That arrangement makes the word more than an attractive abstraction. At the beginning it acts as an opening; at the end it has acquired a different position through everything placed between. The wording need not change for its relation to the listener to shift. Sequence can do work that a title alone cannot.
The composition credits name Kyohei Tsutsumi throughout, while arrangements are divided among Tsutsumi, Tsugutoshi Goto, and Osamu Totsuka. Concentrated authorship and distributed arrangement form a legible production relationship. The singer’s work does not become secondary as a result. Performing a collection written by others is itself a profession of decisions about presenting words and melody. Reserving artistic value for the phrase writes their own songs would exclude a great deal of interpretive work from the history of popular music. This record provides a reason not to make that exclusion.
Titles including Street Dancer and Joyu, or actress, also point toward different public identities: a dancer in a street, an actor before an audience. They need not be forced into a continuous story, and no private psychology need be invented for Iwasaki. They provide a direction for reading, a reminder that the person speaking in a song need not carry the same identification from track to track. A unified composer does not require a unified character, much less a diary whose events must have happened to the performer.
WISH deserves to have its circular structure considered separately from a general period filter. An ending can become an opportunity to reconsider the opening rather than merely a place to stop. Within a City Pop map, the album also reminds us that urban popular music emerges from professional relationships among composers, arrangers, and singers, as well as from personal expression. A wish may be private; making a record is a shared craft. The small matching brackets at the ends keep both propositions neatly in view.