- Lyrics & Music: Kazuya Yoshii
- Arrangement: The Yellow Monkey
Original Lyrics
ジャガーはライフルであの世行き
だから今夜から
から回りさ
きれいな指のあんたに抱かれたいのさ
すぐに忘れるよ あとくされないよ
シルクスカーフに帽子のマダム
このままそばに
シルクスカーフに帽子のマダム
Good bye
一番キツイ テキーラちょうだい
なきゃなんでもいいよ ガソリンでもいいよ
あの人は夢を呟き
ギターを弾いていた
ケモノみたいな目がさ
あんたに 似てるんだよね
シルクスカーフに帽子のマダム
早まらずに
シルクスカーフに帽子のマダム
Good bye
ほんとはいいとこの お嬢さん育ちでさ
肌なんか もっともっときれいでさ
太腿にあるだろう
大きなキズあとが
こいつが全部 いけないんだよね
シルクスカーフに帽子のマダム
このままそばに
シルクスカーフに帽子のマダム
Good bye
紫色の大きな空は
夕暮れに鐘の音を
あたしは今夜 フランス行きの船で
好きなリンゴをかじりながら
ごめん…さようなら…
Romanized Lyrics
Jaguar ga rifle de ano yo yuki
dakara konya kara
karamawari sa
kirei na yubi no anta ni dakaretai no sa
sugu ni wasureru yo ato kusarenai yo
silk scarf ni boushi no madam
kono mama soba ni
silk scarf ni boushi no madam
Good bye
ichiban kitsui tequila choudai
nakya nandemo ii yo gasoline demo ii yo
ano hito wa yume wo tsubuyaki
guitar wo hiite ita
kemono mitai na me ga sa
anta ni niteru n da yo ne
silk scarf ni boushi no madam
hayamarazu ni
silk scarf ni boushi no madam
Good bye
honto wa ii toko no ojousan sodachi de sa
hada nanka motto motto kirei de sa
futomomo ni aru darou
ooki na kizu ato ga
koitsu ga zenbu ikenai n da yo ne
silk scarf ni boushi no madam
kono mama soba ni
silk scarf ni boushi no madam
Good bye
murasaki iro no ooki na sora wa
yuugure ni kane no ne wo
atashi wa konya France yuki no fune de
suki na ringo wo kajirinagara
gomen…sayounara…
Translated Lyrics
Jaguar’s on his way to the afterlife, with his rifle in hand
So as of tonight
I’m going around in circles
You’ve got such beautiful fingers, and I just want to be with you tonight
I’ll forget all about it the next morning, you’ll never see me again
Madam with silk scarf and hat
Stay with me like this
Madam with silk scarf and hat
Good bye
Give me the strongest tequila you’ve got
If you don’t have any, just give me anything; Even gasoline is fine
He used to mutter about his dreams
As he played guitar
He had eyes like an animal
He actually looked a lot like you
Madam with silk scarf and hat
Don’t be so hasty
Madam with silk scarf and hat
Good bye
Actually, I had a very good, sheltered upbringing
My skin gets even more pretty, you know
There’s a big scar
On my thigh
This guy isn’t into any of that at all, is he
Madam with silk scarf and hat
Stay with me like this
Madam with silk scarf and hat
Good bye
The sound of a bell at dusk
In the big purple sky
Tonight I’ll be on a boat to France
Biting into an apple, my favorite
I’m sorry…goodbye…
Notes
Like in “yonsen tsubu no koi no uta”, this is an early appearance of Yoshii’s character “Mary”, both in lyrics and on-stage by Yoshii himself (at least during the Experience Movie tour performance of this song). We’ll get into this more in the next album, but Mary is the former lover of now dead soldier Jaguar, who actually gets his first mention right here at the beginning of the song. It must have been confusing for anyone trying to analyze the lyrics without the context of the album to come, because they’d have absolutely no idea what was meant by “Jaguar” here. Is it the animal? Is it someone’s name? Is it the car?! What’s going on?!
Let’s get this out of the way: This song is WAY too long at almost 8 minutes. I’m not saying it needs to be chopped down into a 2 minute song, but that outro is a little too much, and could have been abbreviated to shave a lot of time off of the song. I love everything Yoshii does in the outro (The “gomen…sayounara…” and his high pitched singing near the very end), it’s just drug out for too long. That’s my biggest problem with this song though, and have mostly only good things to say about it otherwise. I think this is a much better treatment of Mary as a grieving widow (if that’s what she has to be) then we saw in “yonsen tsubu no koi no uta”. Here we still have her sleeping with men, but it seems to be much more obviously by her own choice (to be fair, it isn’t incredibly obvious that this isn’t the case in “yonsen tusbu no koi no uta” either).
Her grief is still here, but there’s a much more real dimension to it: She’s trying to get over the death of Jaguar, who was probably the love of her life. She’s even looking for men who look like him to try to dull the pain, if even for a short time. There’s also a much more hopeful tint to her grief then we saw before: Tonight she’s going to be on a boat to France, presumably to start a new life. So this rings out as a song about leaving an old life behind to start a brand new one, because there are just too many ghosts of someone left behind in that old life.
The lyrics are almost perfectly balanced between giving us some facts about Jaguar through Mary’s mourning of him, touching on her own grief, her interactions with men at this port, and finally her talking about her own departure to France at end. It’s not just all grief, or all mourning, or all sleeping around. The chorus is also very short, and there isn’t much there to chew on. But I think that’s completely by design. Yoshii wanted to really accent the phrase “Silk scarf ni boushi no madam” (it is a good phrase) by having it be the focus point of a short chorus, and have those really powerful female backup vocals on it from Shinobu Fujita and Mikano Tsuchiya. The chorus is also the only point in the song that doesn’t seem to be sung from Mary’s view point, since the madam in question is pretty obviously her. It’s very likely that it’s from the viewpoint of one of the men at port, which makes it being so short make even more sense: She just wants one night with them, and then she’s gone.
What sells this song the most though, is Yoshii’s vocal performance. There isn’t a whole lot going on with the music right up front: A piano, Emma’s arpeggios that continue throughout the song, Annie’s big bomb-like drum hits, and Heesey’s bass acting more like an accent than anything else. But I think that’s because you’re supposed to be focusing on the lyrics and the vocal performance. And though as a ballad this works a little bit less well for me than Freesia no Shounen, this is in the top vocal performances that we’ve heard from Yoshii so far in terms of passionate deliveries. The way he sings parts like “anta ni niteru n da yo ne” (“He actually looked a lot like you”) just before going into the chorus, or even the more subtle “gasoline demo ii yo” (“Even gasoline is fine”) still get me every time. The wonderfully understated guitar solo also features parts by both Emma and Yoshii: Yoshii does the first part, Emma the second. While Yoshii didn’t play his guitar part for the original performance of this during the Experience Movie tour, he did during subsequent performances (mentioned below).
Unfortunately, Yoshii hasn’t said a lot about this song over the years. He has mentioned that it was a turning point for him (though he didn’t elaborate on it any further than that), and that with this song he was trying to write something that was a cross between a more enka-style song about a woman at a port (perhaps resembling famed enka singer Shinichi Mori’s “Hatoba Onna no Blues” and western-style music. He’s also commented that he was very into folk singer Morio Agata at the time, and that Agata was a big influence in leading him down the path to writing songs like this.
I think I owe a lot to Agata as far as my ability to express my private matters in a prosaic way. And that’s allowed me to think of songs not just as individual parts, but as complete stories. When I wrote the song “Madam With Silk Scarf and Hat” (“silk scarf ni boushi no madam”), I thought about just how wonderful songs really are. Hearing Agata sing can bring me to tears, and it made me realize that I should strive to do the same thing.
As far as live performances of this song go, there have only been a few. It was performed as the last song during the Experience Movie tour (1993), featuring Yoshii dressed as Mary. It was back-to-back with “yonsen tsubu no koi no uta”, with “Mary” singing both of them. It was also performed at a couple of Mekara Uroko concerts, though neither with Yoshii dressed as Mary. Mekara Uroko 7 (1996, and can be seen in the YouTube video below) featured Yoshii playing guitar alongside Emma. Before going into the song he also hummed part of the Star Spangled Banner for whatever reason, and then said “Please listen to this love song”. Mekara Uroko 10 (1999) featured two ladies singing backup for pretty much all of the show, so this performance has backing vocals similar to the original recording going for it. It doesn’t feature Yoshii on the second guitar part though. Since there was a full brass section present, we got a sax solo instead of his first part of the guitar solo. Yoshii also takes a stab at hitting the high part at the very end of the song here, and is mostly successful.