Shan Rauf
English日本語

Ikiume no Uta (Song of Being Buried Alive)

生き埋めの唄

宮崎名緒子 (Naoko Miyazaki)

Original
English

Verse 1

kowabatta te wo nigiru.
furueru mabuta ni fureru.
nagai yume no owari nara,
daremo ga shitteiru.

Verse 2

koko yori saki ga kowai.
makkura na iwa no sukima.
oyogu you ni,
hidarite wo nandomo ugokashita.

Chorus 1

"konbanwa!" "konbanwa!"
"itsumo no are hitotsu!"
yuuhan no kaimono de
hashagu kimi ga suki suki suki suki suki

Verse 3

koko yori saki ga kowai.
sukoshi dake kokyuu ga tsurai.
nagai yume ga eien ni tsudzuiteku,
sonna ki ga suru yo.

Chorus 2

"konbanwa!" "konbanwa!"
"itsumo no are hitotsu!"
"konbanwa!" "konbanwa!"
reshiito wa irimasen.

Verse 4

kowabatta te wo nigiru.
hieta hoho nukumeru.
daidai ni somerareta osanai kimi ga suki.

Outro

konbanwa. konbanwa.
dareka soko ni itara
konbanwa.

Verse 1

I hold your stiffened hands.
I touch your trembling eyelids.
If this were the end of the long dream,
Everyone would already know.

Verse 2

What lies ahead frightens me.
A pitch-black gap between the boulders.
As if swimming,
I moved the left hand again and again.

Chorus 1

"Hello!" "Hello!"
"I’ll have one of the usual!"
While shopping for dinner
I love the lively, frolicking you—love love love love

Verse 3

What lies ahead frightens me.
Breathing is a little hard.
The long dream keeps going on forever,
That's how it feels.

Chorus 2

"Hello!" "Hello!"
"I’ll have one of the usual!"
"Hello!" "Hello!"
I don't need a receipt.

Verse 4

I hold your stiffened hands.
I warm your cold cheeks.
I love the childlike you, dyed a warm orange.

Outro

Hello. Hello.
If somebody's there
Hello.

"Ikiume no Uta" (生き埋めの唄) Lyrics | Naoko Miyazaki

Date published: Oct 10, 2026

Context

"Ikiume no Uta" is a nice indie single that Naoko Miyazaki has been performing for years in Japan. As of October 9th, 2026, it has 78 views on YouTube.

The song originated from a SoundCloud demo that Naoko released on September 3rd, 2013 under the name "Sukima" (「すきま」), a word referenced in the song lyrics translating to "gap" or "crevice".

The demo version has minor wording differences like "wakai kimi" (young/youthful you) instead of "osanai kimi" ("childlike/innocent you").

She performed the song live for many years under the "Sukima" title (1, 2), and she expressed that she eventually wanted to make an official recorded version of the song.

She also uploaded a live version of "Sukima" to YouTube on July 18th, 2017. By this point, the lyrics were already changed to match the latest version of the song.

Sukima by Naoko Miyazaki (ミヤザキナオコ「すきま」)

From January 30th, 2018 to December 14th, 2020, her live performances started including the song 「生き埋めの唄」 ("Ikiume no Uta", or "Song of Being Buried Alive"), so she probably changed the song title around then. 1

After her first daughter was born in August 2021, she expressed that she currently doesn't want to sing songs like "Ikiume no Uta", where "unfortunate things happen to children", until the year 2041 when her daughter becomes an adult. It seems like she also sometimes excluded the song from live setlists due to the "current state of the world". That helps explain the long stretch of almost no mentions of the song (except for one recent example from January 12th, 2026).

In February 2026, she shared that she created an official version of the song before her daughter's birth, and that she later re-recorded the "end part" of that version and planned to release the song for the first time. In other words, it sounds like she sat on the official version for a while without publicly releasing it. It was eventually released on streaming platforms on March 3rd, 2026; it's the same version whose lyrics are viewable and playable in this post.

Here's how Naoko's duo partner from Japone (music group) described the song:

Naoko Miyazaki's dream song. Memories and flashbacks of being buried alive. It feels so real and authentic. Full of maternal warmth, and very sad. (July 20th, 2017)

Here's how Naoko Miyazaki herself has described the song over time:

I'm incredibly happy to hear that you enjoy "Sukima", which I always thought of as a modest song, but one that's very dear to me personally. (Oct 6, 2014)

A song born from a dream in which I became a mother who was buried alive together with her son. Since I was unmarried and had never given birth, it was pure imagination, but somehow, it felt like I really had memories with him. (July 18th, 2017)

A song I've cherished since long ago.
It was a song made as a requiem,
but now I'm singing it with the feeling of "No victims, everyone gets saved." (March 3rd, 2026)

The cover art is a picture my daughter drew.
While listening to the song, she drew it, saying, "It somehow has a sad feeling, doesn’t it?"
"Ikiume no Uta" is a song that used to be titled "Sukima", and I’ve always liked it a lot.
Originally I made it with the sense that only the parents would be saved, but now I sing it with the interpretation that everyone is saved. (March 3rd, 2026)

For context, a requiem is a musical composition written to honor, remember, and pray for the dead. This may help clarify the name change to "Ikiume no Uta" (Song of Being Buried Alive), since that title arguably relates to themes of survival and rescue.

On the surface (looking only at the lyrics), the song never explicitly specifies who is speaking at any given moment; this is common with Japanese, where the subject/speaker of a sentence is often implicit/omitted and not immediately obvious. It does seem like the song involves at least two people, where one person is trapped in a "pitch-black gap between boulders", but for example, lines like "konbanwa" and "itsumo no are hitotsu" are ambiguous about which of the two is speaking.

However, two things help clarify this:

  1. Naoko's commentary explains that the song was initially written as a requiem, related to a dream that she had of being a mother buried alive with her son. The song's cover art also seems to depict a child buried alive.
  2. If you listen closely, parts of the song seem to be sung by different "voices". The first "konbanwa" repetitions sound like a young child (maybe overlapped with an adult voice), and then shortly after, "yuuhan no kaimono de" sounds like an adult. The original SoundCloud demo also has these overlapping voices, and in the song "Details" section, the lyrics are particular about which lines get punctuation like quotation marks and exclamation points (all of which I faithfully reproduced in this post's lyrics). Even in the live performance of "Sukima", Naoko clearly changes her usual singing voice during the "konbanwa" part to sound more childlike.

Here's more detailed context from Naoko Miyazaki herself that I learned about after initially publishing this post:

The child's voice in the chorus of "Ikiume no Uta" is the voice of memories from before the earthquake buried them, when everyone and the town were still full of life. It is the memory of my own child cheerfully saying "One of the usual, please!" at the shop. At the end, it is the voice of the child calling out "Help me" to the rescue team from within the rubble. (October 14th, 2026)

Asides:

  • You can think of "konbanwa" as translating to "good evening", but that phrase in English is more stiff/formal than the Japanese phrase which means "Hello" and is only said around evening time. In other cases (like around the morning time), Japanese people would say "konnichiwa".
  • For a while, I was convinced that the phrase towards the end ("kowabatta te", こわばった手) was actually saying "ne ga batta te" (根が張った手を握る, or "I hold your hands that have taken root"), partly because the imagery of something buried/trapped underground taking root felt reasonable, and partly because Naoko mentioned that she re-recorded the end part of the song (during which she could have changed the lyrics). However, after slowly listening to that line multiple times (and after considering that the SoundCloud and live versions are clearly saying "kowabatta"), I'm now convinced that it's a repetition of the song's first line.

Anyway, it was nice to learn more about this song's backstory. I've been doing this kind of thing more often (e.g. see my writing on 夏がくれば by kyooo); I'm often moved by things like this, where a nice song is created somewhere across the Pacific Ocean, from all the way back when I was just starting middle school (~September 2013), and I only now come across it and appreciate it. I enjoy learning more about the backstories and biographies of artists and their art these days.

I first heard this song in an Instagram story from Mazu Sircle promoting his upcoming short film 「大地の子」 (releasing November 21st, 2026). Thanks for the recommendation!

If you're interested in more from Naoko Miyazaki:

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Sources

  1. 1. Another tweet suggests that the earliest performance was ~2017, but it looks like a typo for "2018". ↩