SUNSHOWER’s ending makes life and its surroundings impossible to hold in fixed positions.
By “Furiko no Yagi,” landscape no longer stays reliably behind a character. The song organizes changes in life and environment through surreal transformation, unsettling the ordinary boundaries among species, forms, and habitats. Nature is not placed under the supervision of somebody admiring a view. It becomes the troubled center. For a record readily surrounded by summer associations, this is a consequential turn: an environment does not exist as a service for human comfort, nor stop changing to preserve an attractive picture.
The writing’s metamorphosis and desolation make an ecological reading possible. Ecology here need not first become a complete set of slogans. It can begin as an awareness of relationships: a living thing cannot be considered separately from the conditions sustaining it. Change those conditions and stability acquires another meaning. Rather than immediately assign the goat a fixed allegorical identity, we can attend to the loosening of categories. The strangeness lies in the refusal to guarantee that things will remain what we recognize.
The closing track of the 1977 SUNSHOWER also changes the writing partnership: Onuki provides lyrics, Sakamoto composes and arranges. His instrumental credits include piano, CS-80 synthesizer, and marimba. The text’s world is not entrusted to an exclusively “natural” set of materials. Electronic technology stands beside established instruments in an artificial medium for considering environmental change. That conjunction complicates a simple nature-versus-technology opposition. Imagining an environment already involves making something within one.
The title’s pendulum looks less reassuring in this context. It suggests repetition, while the textual world undergoes irreversible change. Time imagined as swinging back does not guarantee a return to identical conditions. This difference gives the ending a distinctive instability. A record can be replayed, its sequence restored, but the life within the song is not a specimen safely secured in a display case. Recurrence is a form; exposure to change is another fact. They rub against each other here.
“Furiko no Yagi” consequently does not stamp the preceding city and summer as completed experiences. It moves attention from human wishes toward the conditions on which wishing depends. No single mood label can comfortably contain that movement. The record ends, but the landscape refuses to become a view we have finished looking at. The goat leaves something less manageable than an allegorical maxim: a form of life whose changes have not been brought under control.