Appreciating the Music of Hitsujibungaku

Sometimes, the best things in life happen when you’re not looking for them. At least that’s how I feel about discovering Hitsujibungaku. 

I first found the Japanese rock band while researching (or rather, fantasising about) the signature Fender Jaguar of Johnny Marr, of The Smiths fame, on an online guitar store, when I was recommended a similar model by one Moeka Shiotsuka, the singer and brains behind the band.

Little did I know, I would go down a rabbit hole that would permanently change how I listened to music, and would pair me with what would be one of my favourite bands lately. 

If I were to describe my experience of listening to Hitsujibungaku, anything I say would incredibly fall short. Their music seems to transcend language, reaching somewhere words cannot.

The closest representation of this experience that I could think of is a scene in The Shawshank Redemption, where the protagonist Andy locks himself inside the warden’s office and plays a song from Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro over the prison loudspeakers for all of his fellow inmates to hear, in the hopes that it might remind them of what it feels like to be a sentient human being. 

As the film’s narrator Red would reflect on the incident, “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. 

“I tell you, those voices soared — higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away…and for the briefest of moments — every last man at Shawshank felt free.”

Hitsujibungaku taught me, more than any other artist, that music doesn’t always need to be understood before it can be felt.

See, I’ve always been a very analytical listener. Whenever I’m fascinated by a good song, I want to know everything about it.

I’d leave no stone unturned in hunting for interviews with the artist, reading every analysis and interpretation I could get my hands on, trying to understand what was happening in the artist’s mind when it was created — and ultimately trying to distill what we could practically take away from it as the listener. (I mean, this blog probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for my manic research and writing compulsions.)

But listening to Hitsujibungaku made me realise that sometimes, this obsessive search for meaning can become a possessive attempt to control the musical experience. It showed me that, instead of immediately trying to make sense of everything, I could simply choose to be present and listen.

Obviously, I could read the English versions of their lyrics, and many of them are deeply moving. But even then, I’m conscious of what might have been lost in translation. A translated line may communicate its broad meaning, but inevitably sheds much of its emotional weight.

Unless I start learning Japanese — which probably isn’t going to happen anytime this week — I may never fully arrive at the meaning that Shiotsuka intended. Yet, I don’t see this as a flaw that impedes my listening experience, but as a sublime feature that reminds me of how much there is to the world that I am yet to know.

“So what, just get it wrong; it’s how you’ll know how to make it right.
There’s no quitting now; I get it now.
Let go of the math; you know in your heart what you want.
Here goes now; we can head to freedom.”

— Hitsujibungaku,
“more than words”

Take their quintessential song, which is unironically titled “more than words”, from their album 12 hugs (like butterflies). Written as the ending theme for the Shibuya Incident arc of Jujutsu Kaisen, the song was intended as a “place to return to” for its protagonist, Yuji Itadori, after a string of events leave him unspeakably traumatised, consumed by guilt, and overwhelmed by despair. 

And that’s exactly what the song feels like when you listen to it — a safe place for you to return to during your lowest moments. Because when you’re weighed down by such heavy emotions that you can’t even begin to put it into words, you’re not so much looking for an immediate solution as you are to just sit with it for a while. When nothing useful can be said to comfort you, it often helps to just know that you have somebody by your side.

This visceral, instinctive experience beautifully sets the tone for Hitsujibungaku’s music as a whole. It feels very much like a trusted shoulder to lean on, one that shares your joys and divides your grief.

While I was working on this article, an interview snippet with Joe Jackson on the Broken Record podcast coincidentally popped up on my feed. He spoke about how not understanding a song’s lyrics could be liberating, as it lowers our instinct to criticise and allows us to simply enjoy the music.

“I think for the most part, it’s the music that really moves people, and the words kind of tag along afterwards,” he said. “If the lyrics are particularly interesting, they’ll draw me in at some point.”

In another convenient coincidence that happened around the same time, I attended a book-pairing event and chanced upon a book about Jeff Buckley’s sole album Grace. The author Daphne A. Brooks articulated a remarkably similar idea, on how Buckley “was doing something with more than words.” (Emphasis mine)

As Buckley himself remarked, “I’ve always felt that the quality of the voice is where the real content (of a song) lies…Words only suggest an experience, but the voice is that experience.” 

Elsewhere, he explained, “Words are really beautiful, but they’re limited. Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there’s nothing to hang on to. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is.”

Jackson and Buckley’s observations clarified why the language barrier had never prevented Hitsujibungaku’s music from resonating with me. Before I know what Shiotsuka is singing, I hear how she sings it. There is information in her breath, in the restraint of her delivery, and in the moments where her voice rises above the instruments. 

To add to this, I’ve also come to appreciate music as a human and imperfect experience, particularly through Hitsujibungaku’s occasional use of English in their lyrics. Because English is a foreign language to them, you can hear the words being enunciated in their distinctly Japanese inflections, or phrased in awkward ways that sound like direct translations from Japanese. 

There is a sense of vulnerability and self-confidence that I’ve come to admire in this. It’s as if they’re implying, “I’m expressing myself honestly through my music as who I am, not as who I should be. And you can either take it or leave it.”

That same candour can be found in the way Shiotsuka’s songwriting has evolved. 

As bassist Yurika Kasai once observed: “I always tell (Shiotsuka) what I think each time I read her new lyrics. In the past, her lyrics were often about bad experiences expressed metaphorically or the first person repeatedly asking questions to herself. But in (12 hugs), I felt her lyrics have changed and are more about being positive about yourself, and saying to yourself, ‘You’re okay that way,’ including the part of you that dwells on your worries.”

“You’re okay that way.” Hitsujibungaku’s music doesn’t force your worries towards some premature resolution. They allow you to dwell within them without feeling ashamed, hurried, or alone. They meet you exactly where you are.

Shiotsuka herself has spoken about how making music allows her to express what she might otherwise hold back: “Usually in my daily life, I’m more careful about how people will look at us, what people will think about us based on what we say. But once I’m in the process of the production of our songs, I’m not scared of expressing my honest emotions.”

Perhaps, this is what I hear before I begin to understand a single word she sings — it’s someone laying herself bare through her music. The language may not be mine, but the honesty is immediately recognisable, and it gives me the permission to completely surrender to the experience.

Jeff Buckley once described this kind of surrender as “Relentless…endless joy peaking into tears, resting into calmness, a simmering beauty. If you let yourself listen with the whole of yourself, you will have the pure feeling of flight while firmly rooted to the ground…Be still and listen to the evidence of your holiness.”

That, more than any translation or interpretation, is what Hitsujibungaku has given me. They have taught me that listening can be an act of trust: trust in the voice, trust in the sound, trust in what it stirs within ourselves, and trust in our ability to recognise something true — a familiar, unfamiliar feeling that we can’t seem to articulate.

Sometimes, the best things in life happen when you’re not looking for them. Sometimes, they reach you long before you have the words for them.