RURUTIA Planet Translations

001

✸✸ She mentions how scent and memory often get interlinked for her. When she catches a scent, she might be instantly reminded of certain incidents in her life, such as "ah, this scent on the wind is the same as when I returned home from my entrance ceremony in elementary school" and "oh, this scent on the wind is like when I returned home alone one time on my squeaky bike, crying as I went".

✸✸ She thinks it would be nice if this only happened for nice memories, but the reverse is also true in the human condition - the senses can cut like a knife with the recall of painful ones.

✸✸ Rather than just with one's own memories and experiences, sad feelings can can also come from the news, books or films, beginning like a seed. But as they slowly grow into a maelstrom of sadness, and even though they came from oneself, they can't be controlled and their spread threatens to crush a person. At those times, she's overwhelmed by the desire to make music.

✸✸ Around the time she had begun work on her CD jacket imagery for her first album, she became depressed by violence she saw on the news, so she had to postpone it.

✸✸ When she plays keyboards or strings, she doesn't notice other sounds any more, and gets lost in her own world. She forgets even to eat, entrusting herself to the universe of music as if drifting along its waves, and is able to digest the feelings of pain and sorrow she wasn't able to suppress.

✸✸ Therefore, she strongly feels that making music allows her to keep living.

✸✸ She chose never to appear on live performance programs because it didn't fit her style of musical expression. As she explained, when she performs music she enters a meditative frame of mind. What is important to her is how she feels inside rather than reactions from the outside, so she prefers not to be directed.

✸✸ When she engages in her musical activities, she reaches the final apex of closure, so she can't imagine herself being able to perform her songs powerfully and energetically on a bright stage or TV like other artists. If she did that she would be sacrificing her personal musical method of expressing herself in private, and "RURUTIA" would no longer be herself.

002

✸✸ She's very happy if her songs could provide comfort or the support needed to overcome something in her listeners' lives. She too has been healed, moved, pained and also learnt things many times from music, so she thinks music has a great power. Her own songs tell her a lot about herself too - it's fun when it's good things, but being reminded of her own weakness makes her hit a wall as well.

✸✸ Facing music means facing oneself, so it requires facing the sorrowful feelings that led to its creation and necessitates fighting against that so there are many times it's gotten her down. But it also lets her be able to surpass herself, so she also wants to keep trying bit by bit to safely proceed.

✸✸ 'Rurutia' is her middle name. It has a meaning in Tahitian close to 'rainfall'. She heard that as Tahiti is a southern island, the concept has a positive association, since rain is rare enough to be considered particularly precious. She was given the name imbued with the hopes that many blessed things would happen to her. Because there is a similar concept in Japanese of 恵みの雨 · megumi no ame (blessed rain) she has mentioned it in her online profile before, but the spelling of the real word is slightly different.

✸✸ She wrote her song 'maururu roa' in Tahitian, but listening to it makes her feel sad as she heard that the number of Tahitian speakers in the world has decreased over time.