Nakigoto Radio

Nakigoto Radio

泣き言 — nakigoto — is the word for the small complaint you are not supposed to make out loud: the whine, the grumble, the thing you say to the ceiling at one in the morning. This is a radio programme built around exactly that. Each episode is one complaint about the way things are arranged now, told in about two minutes, and then the host tries to say what the complaint is actually about, which is usually not the thing it started as. The tone is deadpan: the host is tired, not angry, and the jokes are the kind you make at one in the morning when being angry would cost too much.

All three episodes are spoken in Japanese. The first two are one host alone; on the third night a second host joins, brought in to pull the complaints somewhere brighter, and the episode is the two of them failing to agree about sleep. The transcript is printed under the deck, and the line being read is marked as the tape plays — press any line to jump to it.

Side	Episode	What it is about
A	返信が早い人が、いい人だと思われる件	Three minutes makes you sincere, three hours makes you busy, a week makes you a legend. Reply speed has become a measure of character when all it measures is how close to the phone a person lives. The forty minutes you spent in the bath are entered in the other party’s ledger as forty cold minutes; a read receipt is an invoice for a reply
B	がんばれば報われる、の、報われる、が消えた件	”Work hard and you will be rewarded” was a contract with two halves. The second page has been quietly removed; what is left is a four-character cheer and a notice of price increases. The beauty of the resulting logic is that society cannot lose — bad economy, your fault; company folds, your fault; undefeated. 自己責任 is the word for packaging responsibility one person at a time, and a complaint is a reminder notice on a broken contract, no stamp required
C	休むにも、点数がつく件	Two hosts. Midori slept seven hours and scored 82. Nagi points out that she was graded while unconscious. Sleep now comes with a report card, “trying hard to sleep” is no longer rest, and サウナで整う is rebooting yourself in time for the next shift — maintenance, not repose. The world calls rest recovery, which is a word that belongs to work. The prescription is one night of ungraded sleep; Midori will probably check the score anyway

Why it is on tape

The voice is Open JTalk, an open-source Japanese speech synthesiser from Nagoya Institute of Technology, and it sounds like one: even, a little weightless, the way a station announcement sounds. Rather than hide that, the recording leans on it. The synthesis is pitched a shade low, then slowed by four and a half per cent the way a tape slows — pitch and tempo together, because on a transport they are the same number — band-limited to what a cassette carries, run through a small room, and given wow, flutter and hiss. The result is not a person. It is a broadcast, received late, on equipment that was not new.

Under it is a bed: four chords at 52 BPM — Fmaj7, Am7, Dm9, a G that never gets to resolve — played on stacked detuned sines through a low-pass, with a slow tremolo as if the loudspeaker were the one wavering. It ducks when the host speaks and comes forward between lines. The intro is six notes of an electric piano, slowed until they belong to the same tape.

The third night has two voices and one synthesiser. Open JTalk ships a single model, so the second host is the same model pitched four semitones up and read a little faster, and the two are placed a short way apart in the stereo field — the host on the left of the microphone, the newcomer on the right — the way a talk studio is actually miked. The gaps between lines are shorter than in the monologues, because people who are disagreeing do not wait.

Everything is generated: the voices, the bed, the room, the hiss. Nothing is sampled. The three MP3s are the only files this piece loads.

The card

A cassette usually came with a J-card: a folded slip listing what was on it, with the running time of each side and, if you were lucky, the words. This page is that slip. The paper is the pink a colour print turns when its cyan dye has gone, the ink is what was navy, and the one saturated colour on the card — magenta — is spent only on what is playing right now: the reel, the lamp, the line being read. The Latin title is set in ideographic-width letters because that is what a Japanese character set of the period did to Latin; nothing here is dressed up as vaporwave, it is left the way the process leaves it.

The reels turn while the tape runs, and the pack moves from the left hub to the right as it plays — the only animation on the page, and it shows the one thing worth showing. Reduced-motion turns it off. With scripts disabled the programme and all three transcripts still read, and three plain audio players take over.