[masaegu]

Originally Posted by languagehacker

So when she came back, he actually did kiss her, correct? She's not wondering what it would feel for him to kiss her, he already kissed her, and she's wondering how it felt to him, right?

Right. That is my take at least. If she is saying something like 「どういう気持でいまあたしにキスをしてくれたのかな 」 in her daydream, it would forever be impossible to understand her lyrics.

Would it have been possible to use a different word than 人 for かわいい人 if she wanted to specify gender, like say, かわいい子? What's the point of using 人 in place of 男?

The only possible alternative I could think of is 娘, read as こ, but not as むすめ. This is pretty normal in song lyrics. The reason Shiina opted for ひと, I think, is that for this particular song こ would sound too cute. 「子」 used here looks too childish.

It is not using 人 in place of 男 that I was talking about. I was talking about writing 男 and reading it as ひと.　To read is as おとこ can sound too direct and too female-chauvinistic. It can sound like one is looking at a man as a piece of meat.

If you are automatically translating "ひと = person", you will not get this custom. Even in real life conversations, we use ひと very often to refer to someone's lover. If a woman says 「あのひと」, it refers to her lover. Same word is used by a man to refer to his lover.　If you translate it to "that person", it destroys everythng. When we write 「あのひと」, we would use 「あの男」「あの女」often with the furigana ひと over the kanji. Shiina probably avoided using 「かわいい女」 or 「かわいい娘」because it can make it look like enka lyrics. Please rememeber that the pronunciation comes first, the letters second in this custom.