Yonezu Kenshi’s “Moongazing” (lit. ‘[I] was looking at the moon’) is the Japanese ED to the newest instalment in the Final Fantasy game franchise: FFXVI. While the game’s English ED — “My Star” — is also known as “Jill’s Theme,” Yonezu said in an interview (see below) that the lyrics of “Moongazing” are written from Clive’s perspective as he gazes up at the moon at the game’s end.
Yonezu, who both wrote and performed the song, rose to fame as Vocaloid composer ‘Hachi’ before beginning to release music in his own name and voice in 2012. He’s since released several albums and written songs for a number of Japanese movies, including the upcoming Ghibli film How Do You Live?/The Boy and The Heron. If you’ve not discovered him already, I’d encourage you to check out his music. Personally, I’m a fan.
Unlike “My Star,” which has English lyrics but no official Japanese ones, the song “Moongazing” actually does have official English lyrics (courtesy of Leo Imai), which I’ve included in teal for comparison. Overall, I think I was a bit more ‘faithful’ to the original Japanese in my word choices, some of which I’ve addressed in the Notes section below—but, as always, it comes down to a matter of interpretation and decisions made by the translator. This is one reason comparing parallel translations (alternate translations of the same source text into the same target language) can be enlightening.
Lyrics & Composition: Yonezu Kenshi | Vocals: Yonezu Kenshi | Co-arranged by: Bandoh Yuta
※Contains spoilers
月明かり柳が揺れる
tsuki akari yanagi ga yureru
Moonlight, a willow sways
In the moonlight the willow sways
わたしは路傍の礫
watashi wa robou no tsubute
I am but a stone on the wayside
On this roadside I am but a stone
思い馳せるあなたの姿
omoi-haseru anata no sugata
My thoughts chase your form
Visions of you come to me
羊を数えるように
hitsuji wo kazoeru you ni
As though counting sheep
Like counting sheep
別れ行く意味があるなら
wakare-yuku imi ga aru nara
If there is a meaning to our parting ways, then
If there is any meaning to our parting ways
せめて悲しまないで
semete kanashimanaide
at least, do not be sad
Then you need not be sad
沈黙（しじま）から離れた空へ
shijima kara hanareta sora he
From the silence to a distant sky
From the silence to a distant sky
一筋の愛を込めて
hitosuji no ai wo komete
I impart an unwavering love...
Fill your heart with an unwavering love
どんな夜だって
donna yoru datte
Whatever manner of night,
No matter what night
失い続けたって
ushinai-tudzuketatte
Though we should continue to suffer losses,
No matter the cost
共に生きてきたろう
tomo ni ikite-kitarou
We’ve lived ’til now alongside one another, haven’t we?
Haven’t we been living this life together
瞬くように
matataku you ni
As though in a twinkling
As if in the blink of an eye
何かを求めて月を見ていた
nanika wo motomete tsuki wo miteita
Seeking for something, I was gazing at the moon
I was yearning for something Gazing at the moon
嵐に怯えるわたしの前に
obieru watashi no mae ni
I’m glad that it was you who appeared
(Before me, who feared the storm)
I was so afraid of the storm, when you appeared before me
現れたのがあなたでよかった
arawareta no ga anata de yokatta
before me, who feared the storm
(I’m glad that the one who appeared was you)
And I’m so glad that it was you
まるで何もかもがなかったかのように
marude nanimokamo nakatta ka no you ni
Almost as though nothing at all had happened
It’s as if nothing before this moment ever mattered
この火は消えたりしない きっと
kono hi wa kietari shinai kitto
This flame will neither fail nor falter, surely
This flame will never go out Ever
その窓を風が叩けば
sono mado wo kaze ga tatakeba
If the wind should beat at your window,
If the wind knocks on your window
僅かに開け放して
wazuka ni ake-hanashite
Leave it slightly ajar
Leave it ever so slightly ajar
ただひとつ そうただひとつ
tada hitotsu sou tada hitotsu
Just one thing. Yes, just one thing,
There’s only, yes, there’s only one
語り得ぬ声で叫ぶ
katari-enu koe de sakebu
I cry out in a voice that cannot possibly speak of it
An unutterable voice screaming out
生まれ変わったとして
umare-kawatta toshite
Even if we should be reborn,
Were we to be reborn
思い出せなくたって
omoidasenakutatte
Even if we’re unable to remember,
Unable to remember
見つけてみせるだろう
mitsukete-miseru darou
I’ll seek it out, you’ll see,
Somehow I know
あなたの姿
anata no sugata
Your form
I’d still find you
全てを燃やして月を見ていた
subete wo moyashite tsuki wo miteita
Incinerating everything, I was gazing at the moon
I was burning everything Gazing at the moon
誰かがそれを憐れむとしても
dareka ga sore wo awaremu toshitemo
Even if someone were to pity that,
Even though I might have been pitied for it
あなたがいれば幸せだったんだ
anata ga ireba shiawase dattanda
So long as I had you, I was happy
I was happy as long as you were there
およそ正しくなどなかったとしても
oyoso tadashiku nado nakatta toshitemo
Even if that were nothing approaching right
Even though we might have been wrong about so much
消えたりしない
kietari shinai
It will neither fade nor disappear
We will never disappear
名前を呼んで
namae wo yonde
Call my name
Call my name
もう一度だけ
mou ichido dake
Just once more
Just one more time
優しく包むその柔い声で
yasashiku tsutsumu sono yawai koe de
In that soft voice that gently enfolds me
With that soft voice which envelops me so gently
月を頼りに掴んだ枝が
tsuki wo tayori ni tsukanda eda ga
The branch that I grasped by the light of the moon
Guided by the moonlight, I seized a branch
あなただった
anata datta
was you
And that branch was you
あなただった
anata datta
It was you
It was you
何かを求めて月を見ていた
nanika wo motomete tsuki wo miteita
Seeking for something, I was gazing at the moon
I was yearning for something Gazing at the moon
嵐に怯えるわたしの前に
obieru watashi no mae ni
I’m glad that it was you who appeared
(Before me, who feared the storm)
I was so afraid of the storm, when you appeared before me
現れたのがあなたでよかった
arawareta no ga anata de yokatta
before me, who feared the storm
(I’m glad that the one who appeared was you)
And I’m so glad that it was you
まるで何もかもがなかったかのように
marude nanimokamo nakatta ka no you ni
Almost as though nothing at all had happened
It’s as if nothing before this moment ever mattered
この火は消えたりしない きっと
kono hi wa kietari shinai kitto
This flame will neither fail nor falter, surely
This flame will never go out Ever
This is the two-part interview between Yonezu and FFXVI Producer Naoki Yoshida that I mentioned above, in which Yonezu talks about his process creating “Moongazing” and FFXVI (among other things). Apparently, he was the first person not on the production team to play the game through from start to finish and got to see it in varying stages of production, so the song evolved over time. The first part of the interview was released 21 June and the second on 23 August, presumably to give people a chance to play through the game before they discussed anything too spoiler-y. I’ve gone ahead and pulled out a few quotes I thought were interesting/relevant:
Yoshida: The second time we met, when I went to discuss your impressions [after reading the script], I distinctly remember you sharing your analysis vis-à-vis your working on creating the song: ‘I’m sure it’s like this so, for the theme—I’m not sure if you’d call it a boon—but I want to give [Clive] something,’ and when I heard your take on it, I could only think, ‘I’d have expected no less from him.’
~
Yonezu: At first, in that sense, I thought to make the song more ‘serious.’ It’s hard to put it into words, but I just, on my own, had the thought that I had to make a song that was more [about being] beyond salvation. But then, as more and more of the graphics came together—be it the characters’ expressions, or something like their emotions—the more I got to see those up close, the more I came to feel like I couldn’t possibly make it a song like that. That’s just the thing: as I said before, my feelings of wanting Clive to find happiness just kept getting stronger and stronger. So I feel like, compared to the very first, first draft of this song, the number of hopeful phrasings has increased.
Yoshida: When I received the first version, when you let me hear it, you said that a lot, didn’t you? That, ‘I don’t know if you’d call it salvation, or what, but I want to deliver him happiness...’
~
Yonezu: Well, as you’d expect, if—whilst envisioning the story’s final scene that plays at the end—I asked myself, ‘What is a fitting song for that point?’, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t help but look at it from Clive’s perspective. ‘What was Clive feeling in that moment?’—or like, at the end of this story in which he’s soldiered on whilst carrying all this karma and sorrow and whatnot—in that final, final moment, Clive felt to me like a peer, and so I wrote the song with this sense that I ought to really pack into it the emotional state/mindset you might imagine he’d be in at that moment...I think that may have been the case.
Notes on the translation:
- In L2, I’ve translated the word ‘robou’ (路傍) as ‘wayside’ in contrast to the official translation, which opted for its synonym ‘roadside.’ Both are correct, but I prefer ‘wayside’ for a couple of reasons. For one thing, given the game’s conception (which drew inspiration from sources such as Games of Thrones), I liked that it invoked related concepts such as ‘waymark,’ ‘wayworn,’ and ‘wayside inn,’ especially since Clive ends up travelling all over Valisthea in the course of the game. For another, similar to the English idiom ‘left by the wayside,’ in Japanese, the phrase ‘robou no hito’ (路傍の人) — ‘a person by the wayside’ — means something like ‘a (mere) stranger, an outsider.’ This, too, applies to Clive, who has the identity he was born with stripped from him and later returns to the place he was born as a stranger, in a sense. What’s more, rather than take up his old title and reclaim his birthright, he refashions himself into ‘Cid the Outlaw’ and takes up his old friend’s cause — outsider, outlaw. And Dominants and Bearers are social outcasts, so there’s that as well. I do wonder if perhaps Yonezu meant to invoke this other layer of meaning when he used the word ‘robou’ instead of the more generic ‘michibata’ (道端), but I can’t say for certain.
- Similarly, the word Yonezu uses for ‘stone’ in L2 is not the generic ‘ishi’ (石) , but rather the word ‘tsubute’ (礫) which might alternately be translated as ‘pebble’ or even ‘gravel.’ Unlike the broader concept of ‘stone,’ tsubute refers specifically to something small and roughhewn. I suspect this is why the official translation added in the words ‘but a’ — as a way of carrying through this sense of being unpolished and insignificant. I looked at the official translation after I’d drafted my own, working off the Japanese only, but I like this decision. ‘Mere’ or ‘humble’ might work as well.
- The compound verb ‘omoi-haseru’ (思い馳せる) which appears in L3, combines the verbs ‘omou’ (思う) — to think — and ‘haseru’ (馳せる) — to hasten — which works out to something like ‘one’s thoughts race to/go to X.’ A more literal translation of this line would be, ‘Your form that [my] thoughts hasten after’ where ‘form’ — ‘sugata’ (姿) — can alternately be translated as ‘figure, shape, aspect, visage,’ i.e. the entirety of how a person looks. However, since that’s an incomplete clause in English, I took the liberty of reorganising the sentence elements in a way that connects more naturally to the following lyric (‘My thoughts chase your form / As though counting sheep’). The official translation reworked this into ‘Visions of you come to me / Like counting sheep,’ which is certainly not wrong, but reverses direction of things (thoughts chasing vs. visions coming).
- The kanji 沈黙 which appear in L7 are typically read ‘chinmoku’ (ちんもく) but here the furigana specify that they’re to be read ‘shijima’ (しじま). Unlike ‘chinmoku’ which means ‘silence’ specifically, ‘shijima’ means something more like ‘silence, hush, stillness’ — like in the English phrase ‘the still of the night.’ It also sounds more poetic, as you would expect of song lyrics.
- L8 is somewhat abstract, as it elides both the subject (i.e. who is performing the action) and a direct object (i.e. what is being ‘filled’). Yonezu does something else clever with his lyrics here: In Japanese, the phrase ‘ichizu na ai’ (一途な愛) means ‘single-minded/wholehearted love’ but the phrase he uses is ‘hitosuji no ai’ (一筋の愛), which I’ve not encountered before and would venture to say falls into the realm of poetic licence. Literally, ‘hitosuji’ means ‘a single line’ but it’s also the word used for ‘a ray (of light)’ which is in keeping with the theme of light within darkness (moonlight, flame, starlight, etc.) that unites the game’s two EDs. Here, however, it’s being used to describe a pure/unwavering/whole-hearted love. To that point, ‘Ai’ (愛) means ‘love,’ but it carries more weight than the English word because it’s used exclusively to refer to a more intimate or profound feeling than the other Japanese word for ‘love’ — ‘daisuki’ (大好き) — similar to the difference between ‘te amo’ and ‘te quiero’ in Spanish.* The transitive verb ‘komeru’ (込める) means essentially ‘to pack/load/charge (something into something else).’ ‘Love’ is what’s being ‘packed’ but the direct object (i.e. what it’s being ‘packed’ into) is left unstated. The official lyrics have translated this as, ‘Fill your heart with an unwavering love,’ inferring ‘heart.’ Both translations reflect the Japanese verb conjugation ‘~te’ (〜て), which alternately allows verbs to function like conjunctions or act as a soft directive. I interpreted the subject of the phrase as ‘I’ (not wanting the person parted from to be sad), while the official translation interpreted this as ‘you’ (a directive to the person parted from) — though, again, it’s not expressly stated either way. The ‘...’ was an experimental way of capturing the incompleteness of the original Japanese phrasing.
- The kanji 瞬くin L12 can be read two ways: ‘mabataku’ (まばたく) or ‘matataku’ (またたく). The former means ‘to blink’ while the latter means ‘to flash, twinkle, flicker’ (again, keeping with the theme of light). Similar to the English idiom, the phrase ‘matataku ma ni’ (瞬く間に) means ‘in a twinkling; in the the twinkling of an eye.’ Semantically, it’s not much different from ‘in a blink,’ but Yonezu’s choice of ‘matataku’ was no doubt deliberate and I wanted to carry that through, hence: ‘As though in a twinkling.’
- Lines 14&15 and 38&39 are two halves of the same lyric and, due to Japanese word order (SOV vs. SVO), the English translations of each end up getting flipped. I’ve included a literal translation directly below my translation in gray for reference.
- Technically speaking, the word ‘fear’ in L14 & L38 — ‘obieru’ (怯える) — is in present tense, even though the person being addressed presumably appeared before the speaker at some time in the past (lit. ‘Before me, who fears the storm / I’m glad the one who appeared was you’). This could be for a number of reasons: Japanese often elides pluralisations, so it might be that the speaker fears a series of storms (plural) which are potentially continuing into the present (though the verb isn’t in present progressive tense). However, I think it’s more likely this is a case of Japanese tense fluidity — sometimes, Japanese will shift into the present tense when the verb feels more immediate to the speaker. Unlike other Japanese words for ‘to fear’ — ‘osoreru’ (恐る), ‘kowagaru’ (怖がる), etc. — ‘obieru’ carries the sense of being intimidated by something; the sort of fear that makes you tremble, as opposed to the sort that makes you shy away or makes your blood run cold. ‘Storm’ (or perhaps ‘storms’) is being used here metaphorically to refer to the trials and tribulations of life, so it could be that they felt insurmountable to the speaker before this person appeared before him.
- L17, L30, & L41 contain the phrase ‘kietarishinai’ (消えたりしない), which is composed of the verb ‘kieru’ (消える) — ‘to vanish’ — and the negative form of the verb conjugation ‘~tarisuru’ (〜たりする) i.e. ‘~tarishinai’ (〜たりしない). This latter means ‘to do ~ and so on’ or — in the negative — ‘will not do ~ or so on.’ In L17 & L41, it’s being used to describe ‘this flame’ so I played with verbs associated with fire: ‘flicker,’ ‘gutter,’ ‘go out,’ ‘burn down,’ ‘be extinguished,’ etc. For the sake of poeticism, I opted for the alliteration of ‘fail or falter’ (official translation: ‘This flame will never go out’). In L30, however, ‘kieratarishinai’ is the entire lyric, eliding the subject (i.e. who or what will never disappear/be extinguished). I opted to preserve this ambiguity to more closely mimic the Japanese (‘It will neither fade nor disappear’ where ‘it’ refers to their time together), whereas the official translation interpreted it as referring to the speaker and the person being addressed (‘We will never disappear’). By doing so, Imai has likened them to ‘flames,’ which I do like.
- The adjectival verb ‘katari-enu’ (語り得ぬ) in L21 is a combination of the verb ‘kataru’ (語る) — ‘to speak, recount, tell (a story)’ — and a variant of the verb inflection ‘~[shi]-enai’ (〜[し]得ない) — meaning ‘unable to, cannot ~’ which works out to ‘being unable to speak/tell of something.’ It’s being used here adjectivally to describe the word ‘voice’ but how you interpret the phrase in its entirety depends on how you parse it in relation to the previous line, or if you interpret it as standing alone: ‘to cry out in a voice that cannot speak.’ The official lyrics interpret this voice to be the ‘one thing’ mentioned in the previous line (‘[There’s] only, yes, [there’s] only one / An unutterable voice screaming out’), whereas I interpreted the ‘one thing’ as being the single thing the singer can’t put into words (‘One thing, yes, just one thing / [I] cry out in a voice that cannot possibly speak [of it]’). Either translation is viable.
- In L24&25, which connect to each other (‘I’ll seek it out, you’ll see, / Your form’), the verb ‘to find’ — ‘mitsukeru’ (見つける) — is combined with the verb inflection ‘~te-miseru’ (〜てみせる), meaning ‘to show [someone] that you can/have/will [do something]; to do [something] demonstrably.’ In other words, ‘I’ll show you that I’ll find you’ (again, using the word ‘sugata’ explained above). The line also ends in ‘darou’ (だろう), making it a supposition, though the ‘~te-miseru’ strengthens the assertion into something like a vow. The official translation captured this by departing from the literal Japanese: ‘Somehow I know / I’d still find you.’
- I deliberated most over how to translate L29, eventually landing on ‘Even if that were nothing approaching right’ (official translation: ‘Even though we might have been wrong about so much’). The lyric begins with the word ‘oyoso’ (およそ), which can mean: 1) about; nearly; approximately 2) generally; broadly speaking; as a rule or 3) quite; entirely; [not] at all. It’s being used the third way here, and is modifying the negative past tense form of the adjectival verb ‘tadashii’ (正しい), meaning ‘to be right, just, correct.’ The conjugation also contains the infix ‘nado’ (など), meaning ‘such as, like, and so on.’ Put together, this works out to something like: ‘not at all correct or anything like it.’ The phrase ends in the ‘~toshitemo’ (〜としても) inflection used for hypotheticals: ‘even if; supposing that.’ It doesn’t specify who may have been mistaken or about what, however. Again, both translations—though different—are valid.
- I’ve translated the phrase ‘tsuki wo tayori ni’ (月を頼りに) in L34 as ‘by the light of the moon’ (official translation: ‘Guided by the moonlight’), but there’s actually no explicit mention of light in this phrase. A literal translation would be ‘depending on the moon,’ where ‘moonlight’ is simply inferred (i.e. ‘depending on the moon [for light by which to see]’).
*As an aside, Jill actually tells Clive ‘daisuki’ (大好き) in the Japanese version of the Sidequest ‘Priceless’ (白銀の君), reserving the grander declaration of ‘aishiteru’ (愛してる) for the cutscene prefacing Clive’s departure for Origin. Since English doesn’t have a way of making this distinction, the English version doesn’t make her confession explicit in the Sidequest, opting to reserve the word ‘love’ for the later cutscene. The respective scripts for this Sidequest scene differ in places and are interesting to compare.
All source materials belong to the parties to which they are licensed. All translations are our own unless indicated otherwise.