Friday 15 June 2007

Pic of the day: For the right atmosphere, here's a picture of an anime-style heroine from City of Heroes. So cute! I know I have put up a picture of her this spring, flying over Talos Island with Reboundancy. This picture was taken by Dark Gold Wielder, my current scrapper. The girl has not leveled much in the meantime, so it is still in Talos. Not that this has anything to do with today's topic, except that Hachimitsu is Japanese and means "honey".

Hachimitsu attack

I was quietly listening to the last.fm page Tsuji Ayano’s Similar Artists (autostart, plays random japanese pop music, not only this song) when I was surprised to hear a very beautiful song, which I was convinced that I had heard elsewhere one of the last few days. It was titled "hachimitsu", a word I did not recognize but later found out means "honey". I had the perspicacity or something to click on the name, which brought me to this page, where you can listen to snippets of it (when it works). It is the first song on the album.

Google is my friend, and I soon found that the song also auto-plays at this Vox page (autostart, subject to change without notice) and on this YouTube.

Unfortunately, the only other words I recognize are "kokoro" (heart), "koibito" (lover), "natsukashii" (nostalgic) and "futari" (being two alone). It is too obvious what kind of Japanese songs I listen to... ^_^;

Since my Japanese intake is mostly limited to anime and the corresponding songs, I assumed that this was a song from a recent anime. Imagine my surprise to hear that it was played in the background in episode 1 of Honey & Clover, which I watched the first few episodes of back when it was new, years ago. And yet I had a vivid memory of having heard it recently.

Unfortunately, my sense of time is not very precise. Sometimes I even remember things from the very near future, like later the same day. But I really doubt that is the case here, since my playing it over and over comes from hearing it on Last.fm in the first place.

So now I wander around whistling or humming Hachimitsu, or just playing it in my head. My head does this a lot, plays music I have heard. I can't hear clearly any text in the replay that I could not hear when I heard it first, of course. Probably less. But it is something quite amazing, my brain can start playing a song I haven't heard in months, years, and even on a couple occasions, decades. But for the next few days, it will probably be stuck on Hachimitsu. Which is kinda fitting, since honey is really sticky stuff. It sticks to your fingers, it sticks to your brain!