The Madwoman from Osaka Wrote a Love Song to a Finless Porpoise

The front rows of a Negoto show in Tokyo are a specific kind of hell: sweaty, bespectacled men in their mid-forties, swaying with the devotional intensity of people who’ve mistaken a girl band for a religion. They were there for the cute schoolgirl aesthetic, the tight harmonies, the whole package. They were not there for Mariko Goto.

A friend had warned me. She’s different, she said, with the careful understatement you use when you’re trying not to oversell something you love. In Japan, different lands almost as an insult. She meant it as a gift. Mariko came out in a white dress and started screaming—not performing, screaming—and by the end of the first song she was somewhere inside my chest and I wasn’t entirely sure how she’d gotten there.

Her new track スナメリ is a love song. To finless porpoises. Specifically to finless porpoises. If you were looking for a way to calibrate the particular frequency Mariko Goto operates on, that’s probably it—a woman who channels the kind of feeling most people can’t even locate, and aims it at a small, shy cetacean that almost nobody thinks about. There’s something both ridiculous and completely sincere about it, which is exactly the combination that gets me every time.

The sweaty men in the front rows were confused. They clapped politely and waited for Negoto. I stood there thinking about finless porpoises and feeling like I’d been punched in a good way.