Venus

A folk-style love song. The title came from Hirasawa hearing that descendants of the Inca can see the planet Venus in the sky even at daylight.

Hirasawa sang the vocal parts before and after the hook in a lower range so as to highlight it.

Lyrics

 * 1 "Could be “star” or “stars”, as the Japanese is ambiguous about number. And since the same word can be used to designate planets at times, it may be “planet(s)” instead."
 * 2 "“People” in the sense of “people of this country”."
 * 3 "Since the sun sets in the west, this could be a poetic way of saying the west is still in the dark of night, even though the hints of dawn are coming in the east. But feel free to look for connections to songs like “The Westward of Time”, which also has a ship hurrying westwards."

Versions
An acoustic ballad whose second half is backed with drums. Used as an insert song in "Pursuit", the second episode of Detonator Orgun.
 * Water in Time and Space, 1989
 * Susumu Hirasawa - vocals, gut guitar
 * Shingo Tomoda - drums

Features a full band with orchestra arrangement and a wind synth-led extended coda, created mostly so that Hirasawa would have time to change costumes mid-show.
 * Eror CD, 1990
 * Susumu Hirasawa - vocals, gut guitar
 * Hikaru Kotobuki, Kazuhide Akimoto - keyboards, backing vocals
 * Katsuhiko Akiyama - bass, backing vocals
 * Kazutoki Umezu - wind synthesizer
 * Shingo Tomoda - drums, electronic percussion
 * Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Nurse - strings, horns


 * Hirasawa Error Engine - Hirasawa Three Acts in Three Hours: Upper, 1994
 * Susumu Hirasawa - vocals, acoustic guitar

Performed as part of TAKA's solo set, with Hirasawa as guest guitarist.
 * I3 Days'94 Tokyo & Osaka

A symphonic, orchestral, string-oriented style arrangement. Hirasawa released 5 sketches of it on "The Aggregated Past KANGENSHUGI 8760 HOURS" website as he worked on it.
 * Hen-Gen-Ji-Zai, 2010

Live performance of the Kangen Shugi arrangement.
 * Tokyo I-jigen Kudou, 2011

Covers
Missa Fukuma (sister of then future P-Model member Hajime Fukuma) performed the song, alongside Mimiyo Tomizawa, circa 1990, without having asked permission to do so.

Jun Togawa has occasionally incorporated it on her live show setlists throughout the 2010s.

For the 2017 movie A Beautiful Star, adapted from the 1962 novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima, director Daihachi Yoshida, who considers Hirasawa as the creator of "about half of my way of thinking", inserted the song in a scene. In it, Akiko Ohsugi (大杉暁子), who believes she is an alien from the planet Venus, encounters 2 street musicians: Kaoru Takemiya (竹宮薫) and Izumi (イズミ), who sing "Venus" together. Wakaba felt considerable pressure to sing it suitably. Hirasawa, experiencing a song he wrote performed by someone else on a film for the first time, felt like he "witnessed the seeds that should have been buried in my garden blooming on the windowsill of a private house".

Connections

 * The planet is alluded to (as the "morning star") in "Recovery Ship".
 * The lyrics touch briefly on the concept of philosophy: In it, Venus is associated with water and the ocean and is the guide through the fearful world of the unconscious, sharing a similar thematic to the song's lyrics. Hirasawa would later explore the field in more detail with Philosopher's Propeller.