Later, I’ll be making a major revision of my translation of the Dirty Pair theme song Russian Roulette, but there’s something I want to get in writing before I forget it.

When I started going through the lyrics, I felt very strongly that the omitted pronouns should be “I”. Discussing it last night with my teacher, we disagreed on a few of them, but I still believed that I was right.

While working out this morning, I realized why: the singer is speaking for Kei and Yuri; she’s a woman pursuing a man romantically, but the life she leads forces her to describe the chase in terms of a secret agent hunting an enemy. Everything in the song is about her; her life, her risk, her heart, expressed to him the only way she knows how.

He’s the listener, addressed directly – “anata” – but never the subject.