Motohiro Hata’s Rain: Leaving Some Light After the Downpour

For viewers who remember The Garden of Words, “Rain” can be difficult to separate from its images. Yet words and melody older than the film flow through that rain. Senri Oe’s song reaches the ending in Motohiro Hata’s voice and Makoto Minagawa’s arrangement. Original, cover and film bring three times together.

Hata’s production account helps explain their meeting. In a 2013 interview, he discussed the original’s unusual placement of words and its modulations, and described avoiding an excessively sad ending. Rain imagery and musical feeling were not simply given one colour.

VIDEO · YOUTUBE

The Garden of Words [Ending Song]

▶Play video

Watch on YouTube ↗

Encountering unfamiliar words before changing a song

A cover inherits lyrics and melody without guaranteeing that the singer will find their language familiar. Hata’s emphasis on the original’s distinctiveness is therefore telling. Before smoothing it into something resembling his own writing, he encountered the movement of another writer’s sentences.

The cover occupies a space between reproducing an original voice and singing in one’s own way. Breath moving through unusual phrasing makes the arrival of another voice concrete. The original work and the new singer’s individuality need not erase each other.

An arrangement that does not end in sadness alone

Hata also described deliberately retaining an eighties character in drums and programming while playing acoustic guitar himself. A new recording is made without removing all traces of the older song’s time. Choices shared by arranger and singer provide a route towards a different feeling within the film’s rain.

Rain can expose distance between people, yet someone within it still wants to communicate. Sadness directed towards what has ended and the wish still to reach another person do not face the same way. The ending seems to open towards the people’s time after the rain, beyond the fact that it fell.

A voice that can be heard after the ending

For a first encounter through the film, images may remain attached to the melody. Listening without the screen requires neither discarding them nor fitting every word to the characters. The garden’s rain can remain in mind while the song’s own speaker addresses someone else.

The cover makes room for both. Routes remain back to Oe’s work, through Hata’s voice and towards the film’s final images. Beyond saying that a song suits an atmosphere, listeners can hear different creative works passing through the same rain.