“I’m in it with you…”
From “甘いワナ ～Paint It, Black” to Ultra Blue to “Stay Gold” to “PINK BLOOD,” we’ve truly been traveling (REFERENCE) across the “Colors” spectrum with Hikaru Utada for years and years.
Now, its time to explore its absence entirely with “何色でもない花 (Naniirodemonai Hana),” or “A Flower of No Color,” the theme song for Fuji TV’s Kimi ga Kokoro wo Kureta kara (The Gift of Your Heart).
Per an official release, the song carries the message that “sometimes you want to believe in something but you can’t, because you don’t believe in yourself – if you can’t believe in yourself, you can’t believe anyone, so instead of doubting yourself, try your best to trust yourself.”
I’d say it’s a total coincidence that the description sounds exactly like RuPaul‘s famous mantra (“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”), but given that Hikki told me they’re a massive RuPaul’s Drag Race fan in our conversation for Billboard, I’m betting it’s not an accident at all.
Time and transience are frequent themes in Hikaru’s music, and this song is no exception: the song wavers between love song (“I’m in love with you, in it with you“) and existential crisis (“in the not so distant future, we will no longer be here.”) No wonder this is one of my favorite artists of all time.
Ultimately, Hikaru opts to try to believe in something a try over going full nihilist, because “if I can’t believe in myself, I can’t believe in anything / That’s synonymous with not existing.”
True to Hikaru’s more recent penchant for producing songs that steadily shape-shift over the course of their runtime, the song – co-crafted with PC Music maestro A.G. Cook – is something of a hybrid.
It starts off as a soft and sweet, almost lullaby-like piano ballad (Fantome‘s “Ningyo” comes to mind, actually), but almost exactly halfway through, an electronic midtempo beat drops, taking us back closer to songs like “Time,” as well as those earlier R&B-pop roots.
The final minute is especially thrilling, as Hikaru begins to really belt out those earnest declarations (“In it with you!“), the vocals begin to stutter, the layers distort, strings begin to swell, and suddenly, it feels as though we’re being thrust into Björk‘s Homogenic or something for a split second. It’s an all-too tantalizing tease of more experimental musical territory, but it’s over just as quickly.
The accompanying Tomokazu Yamada-directed music video is as unexpected as the song’s own sonic twists and turns, as Hikaru goes from serenely, tearfully observing the snowy landscape in Hokkaido to taking a graceful-gone-erratic trek out onto the ice of a frozen lake (“freezing our asses off on a frozen lake in Hokkaido,” as they succinctly described it), contorting, stretching and spiraling out all across the frigid surface.
“We shot this in Hokkaido, the prefecture where my grandmother was born and where my mother was raised. Such a beautiful place!” Hikaru wrote on Instagram. “So grateful for everyone who made this come true, and for the great weather and strong winds that made everything look so magical. And my Pilates and Barre instructors.”
It’s an extremely poetic performance, and certainly one of their most physically demanding performances in a music video to date. The jerky, just-slightly-otherworldly editing and sudden, gravity-defying movements make it especially an captivating watch, as if to illustrate the tumultuous, endlessly start-stop process of finding faith in yourself.
Hikaru added even more insight on Twitter: “The filming method is said to be a trade secret, but it’s not a composite, and the footage was created while myself, the choreographer Aoi Yamada, the staff, and the filming team all slipped and trembled on the ice. It might have been the most strenuous photo shoot I’ve ever done. It was a really beautiful place, and there was a moment when the snow beneath my feet looked rainbow-colored, and I thought it was a hallucination due to the cold, but it turned out to be a phenomenon called a 46° halo on the snow surface 😳.”
Braving frigid temperatures, hallucinations and doing their own snowy stunt work? Incredible commitment to the craft.
Between this, SCIENCE FICTION and the accompanying tour, Hikki truly is in it with us all year long.
You can now pre-order the limited edition and regular edition of SCIENCE FICTION.
“A Flower of No Color” English Lyrics
What you gave me is
A flower of no color
In the not so distant future
We will no longer be here
But for always,
I’m in love with you
In it with you
In it with you
In love with you
In it with you
In it with you
The sun rises because
It promised someone it would
According to renowned scholars
We are just illusions
But today, as always,
I’m in love with you
In it with you
In it with you
In love with you
In it with you
In it with you
But if I can’t believe in myself
I can’t believe in anything
That’s synonymous with not existing
Only the facts that can’t be proven
Are called truths
No one can take away what’s inside our hearts
There’s no need to protect it so much
But if we can’t believe in ourselves
We can’t believe in anything
I’m in love with you
In it with you
In it with you
In love with you
In it with you
In it with you
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Photo credit: Takay
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