A song carried over from the band years holds attachment and independence in the same room.
Before Karappo no Isu became part of SUNSHOWER, it had been performed at Sugar Babe’s farewell concert, a history preserved in Nippon Crown’s account. That gives the song an unusual temporal depth. A band can end while a composition keeps finding forms in which to continue. By the 1977 album recording, the past has not simply been cleared away. The empty chair of the title can suggest the work’s own passage between relationships and people.
The ballad’s lyric turns on a conflict between attachment and autonomy. Its concern extends beyond keeping a place for somebody absent: intimacy complicates the possibility of departure. A connection that gives life a reason to stay can also constrain the imagination of beginning again. Onuki’s song does not require a trial with one desire declared innocent and the other guilty. Wanting closeness and wanting a place of one’s own can persist together, making each decision harder to settle.
The recording has a specific instrumental company. Sakamoto plays electric piano and Arp Odyssey, Yutaka Imai acoustic piano, and Yasuaki Shimizu tenor saxophone. The combination of electronic and acoustic means expands the ballad beyond an image of a singer confronting an empty room alone. Many people can build a form capable of holding solitude. This is one of recording’s gentler paradoxes: an accurate expression of loneliness need not have solitary labor behind it.
Following Tokai on the album, the song changes the scale from city to intimate relationship. The tracks need not share a plot for their proximity to matter. Metropolitan possibility finally encounters the question of whether a particular person wishes to remain. A city can supply choices without deciding which attachments are worth sustaining. The love song becomes a place where the scenery is tested, where large promises of freedom must pass through the hesitations of an actual relationship.
What makes an empty chair difficult to replace may be less its dimensions than the significance someone gave it. The song allows that significance to remain both sustaining and burdensome. Staying need not automatically become loyalty, or departure bravery. Attention belongs to what makes choosing difficult. Carried from the Sugar Babe years into a solo album, the song has not reduced such difficulty to a slogan. A love song can keep a relationship complicated while making the person inside it feel less abandoned to the complication.