YOASOBI’s new single ‘Sakihokore’ (咲き誇れ, roughly “bloom in full pride”) is the theme song of Blossom, NHK’s current morning drama, and like every YOASOBI song it started on the page. This time the page belongs to Risa Wataya, the Akutagawa Prize-winning author of Keritai Senaka, who wrote an original story for Ayase to turn into music. The drama the song serves is about a writer too: its heroine is modelled on the novelist Chiyo Uno.

That makes ‘Sakihokore’ a song drawn from a novelist’s story about a novelist, written for a drama about the same novelist. For a duo whose whole method since their debut has been converting fiction into pop songs, a morning drama built around a writer is about as close a fit as Japanese television offers. It is also one of the biggest stages in the country: an asadora theme opens the episode every weekday morning for half a year.

Wataya, a long-time admirer of Uno, titled her story “Hana no Inochi wa Fumetsu nari”, which translates roughly as “the life of the cherry blossom never dies”. Ayase did not stop at the manuscript. He read Uno’s autobiography, Ikite Yuku Watashi, and, as a fellow native of Yamaguchi Prefecture, travelled to her birthplace in Iwakuni and other places tied to her life before writing, according to the release announcement. In a conversation NHK recorded with the drama’s lead, Shizuka Ishibashi, he called it “a song that stepped past a turning point in life”, and vocalist ikura (Lilas Ikuta) said she sang it “with 200 percent of my feelings, not 100”.

The sound backs up the scale of the brief. ‘Sakihokore’ is the first YOASOBI track recorded with an orchestra, played by Ensemble FOVE, the group led by composer Yusuke Bando, who also directed the session. The choir, claps and stomps were recorded live with current and former members of an acoustic session unit instead of being programmed, a departure for a duo whose early hits were built largely inside a computer.

The asadora slot is also the most domestic stage in Japanese pop. YOASOBI’s international reach grew from anime themes such as ‘Idol’, which travelled because the series travelled with it. Blossom airs on NHK in Japan, so most listeners outside the country will meet ‘Sakihokore’ without the pictures it was written for. And the stacked sources raise a question the YOASOBI formula usually answers cleanly: with a commissioned story, an autobiography and a hometown visit all feeding the lyrics, it is no longer obvious which text the song is adapting.

Blossom began airing on September 28, with Ishibashi as the heroine and Mariko Kaga playing her in later life. The digital single and its official video arrived on October 14. NHK General TV will air a behind-the-scenes special on how the theme was made on November 3, featuring Ishibashi and YOASOBI, with Wataya among the contributors in recorded segments.

Uno spent her career turning her own life into fiction. Now that life reaches Japanese breakfast tables wrapped in two more layers of it, a story and a song, five mornings a week.

Tags: J-pop, japanese music, YOASOBI, NHK, Risa Wataya, Sakihokore