This post-war Japanese sound, primarily sung by ladies in their 50s and 60s, is adapting to seek a younger audience. My besotted daughter is first in line
Photograph: VCG/Visual China Group/Getty ImagesPhotograph: VCG/Visual China Group/Getty Imagesince her father is a longtime music journalist and her mother is a musician, it was inevitable that my 10-year-old daughter would fall in love with music. But I never imagined that the music she would fall in love with would be enka.
Over this incredibly diverse bed of influences, performers sing deeply emotional lyrics based on themes of loss, loneliness, despair, heartbreak and – just as often – celebration and joy. It’s a mishmash of dozens of kinds of music, and too dramatic to be called easy listening. Enka is enka. For readers in the west, the most obvious example would be Kaji Meiko, whose song The Flower of Carnage dramatically soundtracks the beheading of Lucy Liu’s character O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill Vol 1.
How did my daughter come to fall so heavily for a style of music that is generally made by and for seniors? We live in Tokyo and my daughter is half Japanese. Enka has always been in the mix on our home stereo – but then so has rock, punk, pop and dance. So why was it enka that stuck? “I like the lyrics of enka songs and the way the performers sing them,” my daughter explains.
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