Onuki’s title turns urban style back into a question of relationships.
Assign a city one color and it becomes easy to mistake it for one mood. Blue supplies melancholy, pink supplies appetite, silver takes responsibility for the future. Complicated lives become recognizable packaging. “Shikisai Toshi” names color without settling on a particular hue. Its possibility lies in difference: adjacent colors change how one another appears. Read attentively, the title returns the city to something more unsettled than an atmosphere mixed in advance.
The song appears on Onuki’s 1982 Cliché, with her words and music and Sakamoto’s arrangement. EPO is credited with background vocals. That last detail gives the title a collaborative dimension. A piece identified with one artist makes a position for another singer. Color becomes a relationship rather than a property attached to an isolated object. The identity of a voice need not become clearest only after every other voice has been removed from its surroundings.
The album supplies an intriguing frame: “Kuro no Clair” opens it, and a reprise bearing that title closes it; “Shikisai Toshi” stands second. Black and color therefore inhabit the same record without requiring a simple progress narrative from error to enlightenment. This is more useful than the fantasy of a city that remains permanently bright. Looking requires shadow. Distinction requires a background. Abundance includes things that are allowed, temporarily, to stay outside the center of attention.
The album title Cliché adds a warning at the edge of that frame. Images that help us feel the world can harden into ready-made responses. The contemporary habit of reducing city pop to neon faces exactly this danger. A sign that once invited imagination may eventually do the imagining on our behalf. “Shikisai Toshi” offers another possibility: attend to relationships among colors rather than select the most appropriate label from a palette that somebody else has already settled.
Urban richness need not prove itself through additional shop windows, brighter signs, or more opportunities to buy things. It can mean making room for lives that are out of phase: one person beginning, another tired, another seeking a moment without explanation. The song’s title and collaborative credit make such a reading available. A colorful city does not dye everyone the same cheerful shade. It permits difference to remain visible, and makes familiar language seem, briefly, insufficiently exhausted to become a slogan.