Thoughts on「 恋想花火」

I have the LIVE GALAXY reports under works, but I have been once again delayed by various things like getting a new laptop (old one pretty much died and the migration process was... painful to say the least orz) and then I have some done excessive country hopping (3 different countries this week, wohoo). But they are coming up slowly, but surely!

I wanted to take a little break from those, however, to talk a little about 恋想花火, which is the third song in the upcoming single STARTING NOW. I've found myself truly captivated by it recently after hearing it on M no Sekai.

Firstly, there is something I want to address though. I have noticed around the interwebs that there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the name of this song in roomaji. The most common notion being Koisou Hanabi, but I have recently seen something like Risoun Hanabi as well.

The correct reading isn't either of these, but rather Rensou Hanabi. Nana herself says this in the M no Sekai in which the song aired.


(While the reason for this might be obvious to some, I figured I'd take a moment to explain just in case anyone was wondering. In Japanese, you usually have two different ways of reading a particular kanji, the onyomi (音読み) and the kunyomi (訓読み). The onyomi is the Chinese reading, which is often used in words that consist of multiple kanji, while the kunyomi is the Japanese reading, which is mostly used when a word has some hiragana attached to it... but also sometimes in words that consist of multiple kanji, though not as often as onyomi.

So let's look at the kanji in question, 恋 (love).  The onyomi of 恋 is "ren" and the kunyomi is "koi". This kanji can be a little confusing with readings I suppose since there are multi-kanji words like 恋人 (=koibito) that actually use the "koi" reading. Google Translate doesn't help much either in the case of 恋想花火, as it shows rensou hanabi as the Japanese reading, but gives koiso hanabi as the English translation lolwut. )

ANYWAYS. 

About the song itself.

I really love Rensou Hanabi. It is hands down the best song for me in the upcoming single, which makes me kinda sad that it isn't the A side as I can only imagine how heart-warming (and heart-wrenching) that PV could have been.

At first, I thought the song was a typical song of summer love accompanied by a very lovely melody, but once I started paying more attention I realized that there was much more to it. The song is actually pretty sad, as the feelings and magical moments it paints, didn't last very long.  The song essentially describes a love, that bloomed beautifully yet fleetingly and then vanished, just like fireworks. It hit me, that the whole song is a beautiful depiction of being in love as fireworks. Hence the name Rensou Hanabi,which could be translated as something like the fireworks of being in love / the fireworks of feeling love. 

(NOTE: I am gonna talk a bit about the lyrics now, but they might not reflect the actual song since I have no chance of predicting if Nana has switched some kanjis around and those might change the meaning a bit. Also, the translations I made here are really fast and rough so don't mind them too much orz)

The song tells us what to expect from it starting from its very first line, which is:

「いつかあの日の思い出と同じように、

君も消えてゆくから」

(= "Because just like the memories of that day, 

in time you too will disappear")

With that the song establishes a pretty bittersweet tone from the beginning and keeps turning the knife in the wound by then focusing mainly on how wonderful a time these two seemed to have together, while little by little dropping remarks on how it just didn't last. The sadness gets worse when you realize that instead of only one of them being sad, it is actually both of them.

「君の涙のかけらがひらりひらり、

繋げなかった僕達の未来はきっと夏の幻だったから」

(="The fragments of your tears sparkle,
because our future that didn't connect was surely the illusion of summer")

「夜空に満開の花火が明るころ
君のいない世界で僕は泣いたよ」

(="Surrounded by the brightness of the fireworks

 that are in full bloom in the night sky,
In a world without you I was crying")


All of this makes me wonder, why did things not work out for these two? Was it just because they couldn't voice their feelings to each other? Did the other person leave town? Did something happen? Did the other person die? I am not sure if there are any hints to this in the song, as I can't make out all the words. I really tried though. I hope once I have the high-quality version of the song and the official lyrics, it will shed some more light into this bittersweet story, because I really wanna know!

In the midst of pondering about everything these lyrics hide within them, I started thinking this song would have gone really well as the OP for the [Orange] anime that's airing soon! Guess it fits the Nakau campaign too, since that is a fleeting thing in its own way, if not exactly your conventional love story. xD In any case, I might consider making an AMV with this for Orange once it finishes airing, we'll see!

And I'll probably do a proper translation of the song too. Though, my quality checker has been really busy this past half year and I am not sure if I dare throw more stuff his way (he already has Blue and Netsujou no Maria waiting for his loving glance). Time will tell~~