#Also sort of want to talk about how UMG is very much abt wowaka's personal relationship to Vocaloid

[kokkuri3]

A Case of Split Identity in Unknown Mother Goose

I’ve been listening to Ai/Solate a lot recently and it got me to think about Unknown Mother Goose again and how it’s an absolutely fantastic song that’s such a deep personal view into wowaka’s relationship with Vocaloid and how it was ultimately what made him successful in music but also completely isolated him as an artist and one thing that wasn’t ever brought up in ForgetfulSubs’ translation nor have I seen ever brought up anywhere else is a Japanese-specific grammar oddity.

If you know literally anything about Japanese you’re probably aware that unlike English, which only has one first person pronoun of “I”, Japanese has multiple, each with their own levels of politeness and implications of gender and rank etc. etc.

Generally, in songwriting, the pronoun used is 僕 (boku), a pronoun that is polite and familiar. It implies the speaker is male but many female songwriters will use it too, as it’s become sort of a lyrical standard.

This is the first line of Unknown Mother Goose:

Noticeably, the first person pronoun used is あたし (atashi), an exclusively female first person pronoun almost never used in lyrics (and even less frequently in lyrics not about romantic love/not trying to appear ‘cutesy’ to a male audience). Why this unusual pronoun choice? Though あたし has three mora, it is pronounced as two syllables, and 僕 could be easily substituted. Even if wowaka didn’t want to use 僕, he could have used 私 (watashi), a word nearly identical in sound with the same number of mora but with fewer gendered connotations.

Japanese is a pronoun drop language, so not every line that has “I” translated into it actually contains a first person pronoun. However, あたし is used a couple more times until--

There’s a pattern to Unknown Mother Goose’s pronoun usage, one that makes it clear that there are in fact two speakers.

wowaka’s reason for abandoning Vocaloid was, essentially, people were failing to properly distinguish between Miku and himself. Songs that wowaka wrote were being credited to “Hatsune Miku,” though from a production standpoint Miku was nothing more than an instrument. His involvement of the song was hidden, left to be unseen, and he felt so alienated by this that he felt it necessary to forsake Vocaloid entirely, until his return with Unknown Mother Goose.

The pattern present in the song is that あたし is used for all lines where a first person pronoun is present, except in the line あなたには僕が見えるか？ (Can you see me?)

What we get from this is that the one who expresses her love in song is not wowaka (who would not use the exclusively female pronoun あたし) but Miku; it is Miku who the meaning of “say(ing) they loved, wish(ing) for love” ( 好きと言えたなら,  好きを願えたら) lies “in [her] everything” (あたしの全部に). Miku’s purpose was, in wowaka’s eyes, to express love. wowaka once expressed a bit of embarrassment at this; he was told that the theme for the Miku 10 year anniversary album he would be contributing to was “gratitude.” However, he felt it more appropriate to write about love because, as the song says, the meaning of expressing one’s love lies in Miku’s everything.

The only time wowaka (who said that prior to Unknown Mother Goose, he had never considered writing a song about love) speaks from his own perspective is when he asked if he was being seen. He did so politely, staying away from 俺 (ore, a more aggressive, masculine pronoun) like he did in interviews and instead using the approachable 僕. The song was about love, because that was what he felt for Vocaloid. And in that sense, the song shows he did not wish to seem as though he resented Vocaloid for causing him to go unseen. So he asked, quietly, if insistently, if you (あなた, a respectful pronoun and one uncommon in songs, used in conjunction with both 僕 and あたし in Unknown Mother Goose) could see him.

A very subtle, untranslatable element present in the song says a great deal about its meaning, about the creator’s personal relationship to it, about his relationship to the listener. wowaka was an emotional, deeply personal lyricist and his work absolutely deserved to have the effect it did on Vocaloid as a community. ... I miss his songs a lot.