The Alone

There's something alluring about the solitary, introverted character. Yes the independence and freedom, the most radical and obvious of reasons, but so too the mystery of selfhood and pride to defy the crushing universe single-handed.

These are the romantic lonely. Those more connected to themselves than the outside world. Unplugged but tuned in. 

Haruki Murakami seems to simultaneously get the appeal and contribute to it. These types are his bread and butter protagonist, from what of his canon I've read. His stories are emotional at core, very powerful, but the writing is crisp and simple, muted to reflect his stories' inhabitants. The melancholy draws you in, as does the riveting hope for a deserved ending that sometimes comes, sometimes not; for the most part, you are left in a confused state eerily similar in its odd absurdness to the real world. 

The humanity he explores often teeter on the edge of dreamlike and damnable--a challenge to the motif of vicious anger offering instead a resigned, internal reaction to the urbanized, globalized, stratified world. 

I think Murakami's perspective is necessarily created in a Japanese culture where this individual is more common, more a prominent member of society, active in art, than elsewhere. 

This article updated in Jan 2019 says "over a quarter" of people in the US live by themselves. In Japan, this rate has trended downward since the 1980s, with 34.5% in single-person households in 2015. The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates this will hit 40% in 2040. 

 

Artistic expressions of hitorigurashi (living alone in Japanese) seem to create this unique melancholy, a down, bittersweet tone like that in lo-fi beats. It fits in nicely to the depression vibes that Soundcloud rap rides on. 

 

I've only read short stories by Murakami. They feed off the fleeting energy of nostalgia. My friend told me he got 1Q84 recently; turns out it's 928 pages long! I wonder it if tries to sustain the same aura as the short stories for the long haul. Wild that someone can publish both a behemoth like that and thin snippets like After the Quake.

On true isolation: Winter's watch 

On long books: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust is 4,215 pages