A Song to the Sun Debuts on UTB

A beautiful young woman with a lyrical spirit meets a young man and they fall in love. She is a musician, he is searching for meaning in his life and they find happiness together before she dies of an incurable disease. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Or does it? Of course, the summary above applies to “Love Story,” the 1970 motion picture that made Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal stars, but it could equally apply to the newest television melodrama being presented by United Television Broadcasting (UTB). The parallels will be obvious to anyone who remembers the American movie.

A Song to the Sun (Taiyo no Uta), broadcast Sunday evenings at 9:00 pm on KSCI, Channel 18, subtitled in English, tells the story of Amane Kaoru (played by Sawajiri Erika), a street musician who is stricken with a fatal disease and Fujiyoshi Takaharu (Yamada Takayuki), a young man drifting with no purpose that motivates and little feeling of fitting in with society. The two meet and something clicks between them.

Fujiyoshi was raised in an orphanage and is unemployed when some of his high school buddies suggest that he take a part time job at a minshuku family-run located beside the ocean. (As an aside it may be noted that minshuku are like traditional ryokan but are less grand, more homey and cheaper, usually running between $50~$75 a night and include meals. Guests are expected to lay out their own futons to sleep on and put them away when they leave. As one might expect, this is one of the less demanding places to work in Japan.) As he is whiling away the days at the minshuku, Fujiyoshi encounters Amane, who is suffering from what is identified as XP, a skin disease in which the genes are damage by the ultraviolet rays in sunlight. Despite her plight, Ameoto has a positive and forward-looking attitude. She is a street musician with ambitions to become a professional singer and meeting her reawakens in Fujiyoshi the love of music that he had once possessed but had forgotten over the years. This precious encounter changes his life.

The actor, Yamada Takayuki, threw himself into the role of Fujiyoshi. He speaks about the television series saying, “Within the year, July is the hottest period and fighting the heat can get you down if you are susceptible to it. This series is like a blast of summer coolness. (Laughs) There is a whole crowd of contemporary young people who appear in the show as a tableau of the springtime of life. All of them ride the crest of the times and enjoy themselves while carrying on with their lives.”

Sawajiri Erika (Amane) has her own take on the matter. “I think that everyone has a ‘dream’ and has the need to express it and see it realized. This is a cool summer drama that all of the actors, the film crew and the people on location enjoyed working on together,” is her comment.

A Song to the Sun may seem to be a straightforward story of young people finding their way in the world, but there are some nuances that might not be clear initially. First, the sun in the title is a metaphor for the passion (jonetsu in Japanese, with a feeling of heat) of youth. Ameoto burns with a passion for life that is mocked by her vulnerability to the heat of sunlight. She is aware that she is going to die and is determined to make the most of the time that she has left.

Fujiyoshi represents the callow side of youth. He has too much time on his hands, in ironic opposition to Amane’s plight. For him, life is a puzzle. He struggles to find the happiness that life promises, the meaning and purpose that he senses must be there.

In addition, the title in Japanese, Taiyo no Uta reminds one of another paean to youth, Taiyo no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun), which was published in 1955 by a 23 year old college student, Ishihara Shintaro. That novel told of a group of college students who rebelled against the mores of the time. They were from privileged backgrounds but used yakuza gangster jargon in their speech, they gambled and got into gang fights and generally raised hell. The novel won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and propelled the author into a career that eventually led into politics. Ishihara is now the mayor of Tokyo and one of the most prominent politicians in Japan.

What a difference fifty years make! A Song to the Sun might focus on disaffected youth, but there is little rebellion here. (Viewers may remember Yamada from his appearance in a previous show broadcast on UTB, Waterboys, the quintessential fluff melodrama if ever there was one.) The Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) producer of the series, Tsuryu Masaaki states, “Like the movie version, the core here is the love story between the two young people, but it does not simply concentrate on the incurable disease, it is a drama of youth that tries to convey the cool breezes of summer.”


A Song to the Sun, Sundays at 9:00 pm on KSCI, Channel 18, subtitled in English




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