Kawa no Nagare no Yō ni

The river in Kawa no Nagare no Yō ni is New York's East River. The lyricist Yasushi Akimoto was living in New York when he wrote the words in a café there, homesick and far from Japan. He usually added titles last, but this time, he said, he began with the title, probably because he had been staring at the East River all along. Misora Hibari had asked for an album that would leave a message for younger listeners who did not know her songs, which is why Akimoto, then popular with young audiences, was brought in. Akira Mitake wrote the music. Her staff unanimously wanted a brighter pop number, Ha Ha Ha, as the single. Hibari disagreed. She compared the song to her own life: a drop of rain running down a tree root becomes a stream, bumps into one thing and another, grows into a great river and finally reaches the sea. Normally she deferred to her team, but this time, by their account, she begged to be allowed to decide. At her last press conference in October 1988 she called it a song about life. The single came out on 11 January 1989. On 24 June she died, aged 52, and it became her final release. Sales kept climbing after her death, and by 2019 it had passed two million copies, her biggest single. Fellow singers sang it at her funeral, and in a 1997 NHK poll it was voted the song that had most moved Japanese people in the twentieth century. Her farewell has become the country's song about the course of a life.