When remedies multiply, the original question can become harder to see.
Modern life is skilled at naming discomfort and promptly producing a shopping list. Tiredness finds a product, loneliness a service, inarticulate unease a feature that needs upgrading. Taeko Onuki’s Kusuri wo Takusan, a title suggesting plenty of medicine, places something usually associated with careful measure beside the idea of abundance. That juxtaposition offers a critical opening: what happens to the desire for improvement when more is repeatedly allowed to stand in for better?
The second track on the 1977 SUNSHOWER, it brings together players including Haruomi Hosono on bass and Shozo Nakagawa on flute. Its title brings a vocabulary of bodies, maintenance, and repair into the company of the album’s opening seasonal invitation. The adjacency matters. Pleasure and discomfort do not have to occupy unrelated worlds. Good weather can coexist with fatigue, just as a life that appears to be going well can contain a difficulty its owner has not yet learned to name.
As a metaphor, medicine makes the shape of a solution unusually visible, directing attention toward the ways help becomes recognizable and measurable. Countable remedies make progress look definite; complicated situations may refuse the proposed units. Translating a problem into something one can accumulate offers reassurance, but it can also obscure what was wanted initially. The title’s abundance invites a pause. With answers becoming plentiful, is there still time to ask whether the question has been properly understood?
This makes a suggestive approach to consumer culture. Urban convenience repeatedly promises that the next acquisition will make life easier. The promise is not invariably false; genuine care requires resources. Yet treating every unease as an individual management project leaves a person permanently responsible for becoming more efficient. The title permits a small resistance: wonder why a complete life should be pictured as a series of defects awaiting correction. Criticism sometimes gains strength by declining to supply an immediate replacement remedy.
Kusuri wo Takusan can be valued for making that interval available. A practical word enters art, where it is no longer required to behave like an instruction leaflet. We can set the impulse to improve ourselves at a slight distance and examine the difference between attention and pressure, care and management. Having an unresolved difficulty need not first be justified by obtaining another solution. A song can leave the question visible long enough for us to recognize it.