Song Meaning: リッツパーティー - back number

In B major, at 120 beats per minute, with the strummy mid-tempo three-piece arrangement that earned the parent album CD Journal's tag of grunge-and-alt-leaning edgy guitar, a tight rhythm section, and a vocalist whose melancholy comes pre-installed: this is the brightest-titled song on back number's 2011 major-label debut. It is also the saddest song on the album that nobody calls sad.

"Ritz Party" (リッツパーティー) is track ten on Super Star, the record that introduced this Gunma three-piece to the country at large. It runs three minutes and sixteen seconds. It contains no party. The chorus describes one that never happens; the verses describe two people who keep not having one. The whole song is a man rehearsing what he should be saying to his girlfriend while not saying it, while continuing to not see her.

The track's most striking move is that it rewrites its own chorus. The first chorus ends 「これは後でいいや」 — kore wa ato de ii ya, "I'll save it for later." The second chorus ends 「ちゃんと言いに行こう」 — chanto ii ni ikō, "I'm going to go say it properly." The chorus is otherwise word-for-word identical. One substitution at the very end carries the entire emotional motion of the song.

That substitution, and the architecture that gets us there, is what we're here for.

Five days, two phone calls

The narrator opens by sketching, with disarming candor, exactly how thin he has stretched things.

なかなか会えない日々が
続いてはいるけれど
次の休みには会いに行くから
Nakanaka aenai hibi ga
Tsuzuite wa iru keredo
Tsugi no yasumi ni wa ai ni iku kara
We haven't been seeing each other much lately,
and yes, that's been going on a while, but
I'll come visit on my next day off.

The grammar is the giveaway. 続いてはいるけれど (tsuzuite wa iru keredo) is a quietly defensive construction: not just "this has been continuing" but "yes, it has been, but...". The は particle gestures toward an objection the speaker is preempting. Before she has said anything, he is already explaining himself.

Then comes the receipt:

メールもあんまりしないし
電話も5日に2回
機嫌を取るには少なすぎるな
Mēru mo anmari shinai shi
Denwa mo itsuka ni nikai
Kigen o toru ni wa sukunasugiru na
I don't really email much,
and I only phone twice every five days,
not nearly enough to keep her sweet.

Five days, two calls. The math is announced like an itemized bill, and the conclusion he draws from it sits at the heart of the verse: 機嫌を取るには少なすぎるな, kigen o toru ni wa sukunasugiru na.

機嫌を取る (kigen o toru) is the Japanese verb for managing someone's mood, smoothing them over, keeping them happy. The obvious English translation lands somewhere around "keep her happy" or "stay on her good side," and that's what the line means; the underlying figure, though, is closer to the English "humor someone." 機嫌 is kigen, mood. 取る (toru) is to take, to take hold of, to secure. To 機嫌を取る a person is to actively manage their weather. It's what you do for a customer, for a difficult boss, for a small child whose nap was cut short. The vocabulary is transactional. Maintenance. A task one performs.

What we hear, then, in this casually self-aware narrator, is not a man who isn't calling enough. It's a man whose private model of being a boyfriend has reduced to am I doing enough to keep her from getting upset. There is no question in the verse about what she might want, or how she's feeling, only how he's pacing his side of an obligation. The passive voice he uses about the relationship itself, 続いてはいるけれど ("it's still continuing"), is the same vocabulary you'd use to describe a habit you haven't quite broken.

The verse closes on a soft turnaround that should feel like grace and lands more like a problem:

あぁそれでも君は今日だって
しょうがないなって許してくれる
Ā soredemo kimi wa kyō datte
Shōganai na tte yurushite kureru
And even so, today again, she sighs "what am I going to do with you" and lets it go.

しょうがないなって is the soft, particle-laden lover's-rebuke, the shōganai na delivered with affection while shaking your head. The construction 〜って許してくれる (the て-form yurushite with the giving auxiliary 〜くれる) literally means "she does the favor of forgiving me." She is doing something for him. The verse never asks whether that should be her job.

謝る暇があるなら会いに行こう

Then, almost in passing, the narrator says the truest thing he will say in the entire first half of the song:

謝る暇があるなら会いに行こう
Ayamaru hima ga aru nara ai ni ikō
If I have time to apologize, I should be using it to go see her instead.

This is one line. It is also, structurally, the entire moral of the song, dropped like a coin into a fountain three-quarters of the way through the second pre-chorus. He has just realized — or is at least pretending to realize — that the energy he is spending on the project of being forgiven is energy that could be redirected into the project of actually showing up.

The verb is volitional: 行こう (ikō), "let's go," "I'll go." It is the most active verb-form he has reached for so far. Up until now, his sentences have been descriptive: continuing, not emailing, calling twice. Suddenly there is intent.

But the intent has a hedge wrapped around it. 謝る暇があるなら, ayamaru hima ga aru nara: "if I have the time to apologize." The conditional is a tell. The line isn't I'm going to go see her; it's if there's time, I should. The realization arrives still wearing its excuses.

This will become the song's central pattern. Every clear-eyed thing the narrator thinks gets immediately softened by a conditional, an "if I could," a "would be nice." He has the right intuitions. He hasn't yet built the structure where having an intuition is the same thing as acting on it.

The line also seeds what's to come. In four minutes, he will repeat this idea, let me go to her properly, but stripped of conditions and excuses. The verb 言いに行こう ("let's go to say") at the end of the second chorus is the same volitional 行こう that surfaces here for the first time. He has the right grammar from the start. He just isn't using it yet.

About the most famous Japanese party that never happened

The title doesn't match the song. That gap, in this case, is doing more work than most album titles manage in a career.

For Japanese listeners in 2011, リッツパーティー landed automatically, and a little wryly. Yamazaki Nabisco had been running their Ritz cracker commercials with actress Yasuko Sawaguchi since 1988. In twenty-eight years of those commercials, friends would arrive at her impeccable apartment, she would lay out crackers topped with cream cheese and caviar and asparagus and salmon roe, and the whole ritual would be referred to, in advertising shorthand, as a Ritz Party. By 2011 the phrase was so embedded in the cultural water supply that an entire generation could picture it on cue: the bright kitchen, the clinking glasses, the impossibly stylish casual entertaining.

Here is the small fact about the Ritz Party that turns out to matter. In twenty-eight years of those commercials, the words "Ritz Party" were never actually spoken on camera; Sawaguchi confirmed this herself in 2016, on the show that wrapped the campaign. The Japanese website J-CAST would later note, with admirable directness, that the Ritz Party had become one of Japan's "three most famously-known-but-never-actually-held events," a thing everyone could describe in detail but had never thrown, never attended, never quite gotten around to. An imagined social ritual the country half-believed it participated in.

Vocalist and lyricist Iyori Shimizu, in interviews compiled by the music site Cal-cha, has said that the title for this song came first: he wanted to write, in his own phrase, a 底抜けに明るいパーティーソング, a totally bright party song, and built outward from that title. What he ended up with, by his own admission later to the magazine CUT, lives in a category he there called 恋の陰り — koi no kageri, love's shadow, the dimming. He has classified this song alongside others on the same emotional terrain: relationships where the weather has changed but no one has acknowledged it yet.

The contrast is the song's whole formal joke, told quietly. The brightest title in the back number catalog hangs over a song about two people who can't meet. The cracker-commercial party — bright and aspirational and never quite real — is the perfect frame for a relationship that exists mostly as an idea the narrator keeps deferring.

晴れ渡るように, and the chorus that puts it off

And here is the chorus the narrator can hear in his head:

足りないものを見つけて
それが君だとちゃんと言おう
ねぇ君の心がいつだって
晴れ渡るように努力をしなくちゃ
君の弱さも強さも
全部まとめて面倒みるから
なんて言えたらいいなって
思ってるけどこれは後でいいや
Tarinai mono o mitsukete
Sore ga kimi da to chanto iō
Nē kimi no kokoro ga itsudatte
Harewataru yō ni doryoku o shinakucha
Kimi no yowasa mo tsuyosa mo
Zenbu matomete mendō miru kara
Nante ietara ii na tte
Omotteru kedo kore wa ato de ii ya
I'd find the thing I've been missing
and tell you, properly, that it's you.
Hey, I should be working
to keep your heart clear-skied always,
taking care of all of you,
the weak parts and the strong.
Things like that, I keep thinking it would be nice if I could say.
But this can wait for later.

晴れ渡る (harewataru) is a word with weight. 晴れる on its own means to clear up; the verb-stem 〜渡る ("to extend across") intensifies it into cleared completely, edge to edge, no remaining clouds. It is a meteorological word. In Japanese, you use it of the sky after a long rain, when there isn't a single grey patch left. To wish someone's heart 晴れ渡る is to wish them weather that exists only on a few perfect days a year.

晴れ渡る is also, sonically, a word that opens. Ha-re-wa-ta-ru: five syllables, three of them carrying the wide-open A. The mouth has to be open to say it. The word sounds like its meaning.

面倒みる (mendō miru) is the matched term in the next line: to look after, to take care of, to handle. It is gentler than 機嫌を取る from the verse. 機嫌を取る is what you do for someone whose mood you're managing; 面倒みる is what you do for someone you've decided is yours. There is real tenderness in the phrasing. He is sketching, internally, the man he could be.

And then the line that ends the chorus.

これは後でいいや, kore wa ato de ii ya. "This can wait for later." "I'll save it for now."

That last particle, や, is a casual self-permission. It's the particle a person uses talking to themselves, the verbal equivalent of a small shrug. It's the tone you take when deciding whether to do the dishes tonight or in the morning. Eh, later's fine. The grammar of the rest of the chorus has been pitched at the register of devotion: 〜なくちゃ ("I need to"), 〜から ("because"), volitional 言おう ("I'll say"). And then, having sketched the whole architecture of being a present partner, he closes with the throwaway particle of postponement. や is the particle of a person letting himself off the hook in the privacy of his own head, and I find it the most damning sound in the verse.

The chorus tries to be a love song. The last phrase admits it's a draft.

お互い様, and the moment it cracks

Verse two is hers. Or rather, it's something she has said, that he is now reporting:

ある日君が言う
会いたい時には
いつでもあなたはいないけど
寂しくてつらい事もお互い様で
分け合えているのならさ
嬉しい
Aru hi kimi ga iu
Aitai toki ni wa
Itsudemo anata wa inai kedo
Sabishikute tsurai koto mo otagai-sama de
Wakeaete iru no nara sa
Ureshii
One day you say:
"When I want to see you,
you're never around. But
if we're sharing the loneliness, the rough parts,
if we're carrying them between us,
that makes me happy."

There are a few small Japanese phrases that English doesn't have a clean grip on, and お互い様 (otagai-sama) is one of them. It's the phrase you use when you want to insist that something painful or awkward is not one person's fault but a mutual condition. We're both in it. The same goes for me too. In a conversation about loneliness, it is the most generous thing you can say: I'm not going to pin this on you; I'm carrying my half.

Then the verb: 分け合える (wakeaeru), the potential form of 分け合う, "to share with each other." Potential form: to be able to share. She is not saying we are sharing. She is saying if we're able to share. The conditional is hers, too; she is reaching out without quite committing to the claim. The whole sentence is propped up by an "if": if we're able to share the lonely, painful parts, that makes me happy.

You can almost see her phrasing the sentence carefully so it can't hurt him. She has loaded it with so much grace that it becomes possible to mistake it for something easy.

She lands on a single word: 嬉しい, ureshii, "happy." Released from the rest of the sentence, sitting on its own line in the lyric sheet, like a small concession given without armor.

Anyone listening properly should hear the structure straining. The grammar is doing nothing but being kind.

Her voice, only slightly lonelier

And he, finally, hears it.

そう言った君の声が
いつもより少し寂しそうで
本当はいつもそばにいて
って言ってる事
やっと気付くんだ
Sō itta kimi no koe ga
Itsumo yori sukoshi sabishisō de
Hontō wa itsumo soba ni ite
Tte itteru koto
Yatto kizuku n da
Your voice, when you said it,
sounded a little lonelier than usual,
and what you were really saying
was "please, always be near me."
I'm finally getting it.

The two key words in this passage are small ones, and they do a lot of work.

少し (sukoshi), "a little." Not 「とても寂しそうで」, "very lonely-sounding." Not 「すごく寂しそうで」, "really lonely-sounding." Just a little. The smallness is the entire point. This is not a woman crying on the phone. This is not a fight. It is a fractional shift in tone that he could easily have missed, and very nearly did. The song is precise about how lightly she carries her loneliness, and how much paying attention it took for him to register it.

Then やっと (yatto), "finally," "at last." A time-word, and a confessional one. やっと doesn't mean just now. It means finally, after far too long. He is announcing that what she has been saying is what she has always been saying, and what he is hearing for the first time is something she has been saying the entire time. The realization isn't new information about her. It is new attention.

This is back number's home territory and back number's central anxious-male voice, the voice that, three years later, would build the band's commercial breakthrough on songs like "高嶺の花子さん" (Takane no Hanako-san, "Miss Out-of-My-League") and the JR SKISKI campaign theme "ヒロイン" (Heroine). It is a voice that catalogs its own emotional shortfalls and then, at the last possible moment, attempts something. Lyricist Iyori Shimizu started the band in 2004 in Gunma after an ex left him for another musician, and named the project back number (型遅れ, "old issue") in self-deprecating reference to that fact. He has spent his catalog circling exactly this kind of man. The narrator of "Ritz Party" is not an outlier on the album. He is, in a sense, the band's recurring protagonist.

ちゃんと言いに行こう

The chorus comes back. The grammar of the body is the same. The wishes are the same, in the same order: find the missing thing, name it as her, work to keep her clear-skied, take care of all of her. The verse-form, the syllable count, the chord changes, all of it. The chorus has not been rewritten. It has been re-finished:

なんて言えたらいいなって思ってる事
ちゃんと言いに行こう
Nante ietara ii na tte omotteru koto
Chanto ii ni ikō
All those things I keep thinking it would be nice if I could say,
I'm going to go say them, properly.

The first chorus rendered the same content as a clause modified by けど ("but"): I think these things, but this can wait. The second rebuilds the same content as a noun phrase modified by 事 ("the things [I've been thinking]"), and follows it with a verb of motion: 言いに行こう, "let's go to say." Same words leading in. The grammar's destination has changed. The lyric sheet shows it visually, too: in the first chorus the words 「思ってるけど」 sit at the start of the final line, weighted by the line break that arrives immediately before them; in the second chorus they fold into the noun phrase above, leaving the new last line, 「ちゃんと言いに行こう」, alone on its own. The first chorus stops thinking. The second chorus stands up.

ちゃんと (chanto) deserves a word here. It's an adverb the song has been waiting for. Chanto doesn't mean "well" or "fully"; it means the way it ought to be done, properly, without cutting corners. It is the word a parent uses to a child about brushing their teeth. Chanto. Don't half-do this. The narrator who, three minutes ago, said 機嫌を取る needed only enough phone calls to keep her from getting upset is now saying chanto: properly, completely, the way you do when something matters.

And yet the song stops at intent.

言いに行こう is volitional. Let's go say it. He has not, in the timeframe of the song, actually gone. The track ends on the moment of resolve, not on the moment of arrival. There is no reunion scene; there is no scene of him at her door. He is, as the final note rings out, somewhere between his living room and hers. The song is the journey only as far as the decision to make it.

Whether 言いに行こう ever becomes 言いに行った — past tense, I went and said it — is left, deliberately, off the page. I don't think he gets there, at least not on the schedule he keeps promising himself. But anyone who has been in the position the song describes knows that the gap between let's go and went is the entire problem the song is about.

What the title was always going to be

Back to the title, one more time, because that's where the song actually ends.

A Ritz Party, in the cultural shorthand the song is leaning on, is a small, casual gathering: a few friends, some crackers, some toppings, an afternoon you don't need to dress up for. It is the social event that doesn't require effort. The kind of thing that can wait for later. We can have a Ritz Party next time.

That, finally, is what the title is doing. The song is not about a party. It is about a man who has been treating a relationship like a Ritz Party — the casual gathering, the thing you can put off, the small bright social occasion that can be rescheduled to a more convenient day. The song's whole arc is the moment he stops believing that's what it is. The chorus that ends with これは後でいいや is the chorus of a Ritz Party. The chorus that ends with ちゃんと言いに行こう is the chorus of someone who has just understood that this isn't one.

For a song built on a title chosen first and described by its own author as an attempt at a totally bright party song, "Ritz Party" is doing a startling amount of formal work. The musical surface stays bright for three minutes and sixteen seconds. The lyric, very quietly, takes the brightness apart and asks what it was a substitute for.

📖 Read the full lyrics with English translation and romaji → /en/artists/back-number/lyrics/ritzparty/
📝 Learn the Japanese in this song → Coming soon

Song Information