[languagehacker]

Originally Posted by masaegu

I am not a particularly big fan but I used to watch her sing when she sang on TV often. Now, I rarely hear her name in the media anymore. Shiina was once very popular here; That is for sure.

Your interpretation of the line 「短い嘘を繋げ赤いものに替えて阻害されゆく本音を伏 せた」 actually seems more than possible in retrospect. The reason for me to think otherwise, mostly, was the fact that in the very next stanza, she accuses him of being a liar:

「可愛い人なら捨てる程居るなんて云うくせに
どうして未だに君の横には誰一人居ないのかな」
_______

Could it be that the 真っ赤な嘘 refers to something that the boyfriend said? Like when he said "可愛いひとなら捨てる程いる?"

Also, someone else said

She tied several pieces of lies(＝嘘） together to make up "赤いもの"--or "運命の赤い糸," thread of fate/destiny that ties a man and a woman. It means they didn't truly understand each other....it was only pretension（嘘）.

She makes "嘘でできた赤い糸."-- then it becomes more difficult to show her "本音"(=本音が疎外されていく）。--then more and more she has to "本音を伏せる"（--Then she will have to make up more 「嘘」--a vicious circle.）

How does that explanation sound to you?

My own take on
「足らない言葉よりも近い距離を好み 理解出来ていた様に思うが
君に涙を教えた」
is that she thought that he found comfort in their "everyday" physical closeness despite her consistent lack of words but she made him cry in the end (by leaving the town).

And yes, the paragraph you posted tries to analyze those two lines. It is saying just about the same thing I said. Towards its end, it says that he changed and started finding a happiness in the fact that she was his GF and she was always near him, but the girl was still stuck in her "deep ideal world" , which put the two on different wave lengths. She was cold and brutal.

So is the subject the boyfriend and the object both of them? Could both of them be the subject as well?

Since the subject and object can be left out of Japanese sentences, I find that I have to consider up to nine possibilities when interpreting a line in this song:
1. Subject: Shiina Object: Shiina
2. Subject: Shiina Object: Boyfriend
3. Subject: Shiina Object: both of them
4. Subject: Boyfriend Object: Shiina
5. Subject: Boyfriend Object: Boyfriend
6. Subject: Boyfriend Object: both of them
7. Subject: both Object: Shiina
8. Subject: both Object: Boyfriend
9. Subject: both Object: both of them

Someone else thought that it meant, "Both of us preferred closeness in distance to words that often fail, and I thought we understood each other."

I asked him how he knew the subject was both of them. This is what he said:

As the verb "好み" assumes the 連用形(ren-you-kei) form, the subjects for "好み" and "理解できていた" have to be identical. The subject for these verbs could be her, but then what he means by "理解できる" would be a matter of intellect and the overtone would be that of a guy snubbing on his ex. It's not plausible that such a guy would use a nice, euphemistic phrase like ”君に涙を教えた”, so the context of ”理解出来ていた” must be that of tacit mutual understanding between them (incidentally, tacit understanding or agreement of this sort is a recurring theme in Japanese pop songs.)
There's another point in the language. The phrase ”様に思うが” in the original text modifies ”足らない言葉よりも近い距離を好み” as well as ”理解出来ていた”. I didn't translate that structure literally because the translated sentence would be a bit bulky.

What do you make of this?