How to enjoy living alone – it's the coming thing for many of us

She grew up in a big lively happy family and yearned for an attic.

Happy and lively herself, she loved her parents and brothers and sisters, took active part in family amusements – but solitude called her, and as soon as she was old enough she answered the call.

Does solitude call all of us? Maybe it does, suggests PHP magazine (March).

More Japanese than ever are living alone. Thirty-eight percent of all households were single-occupant as of 2020. A rise that began decades ago has yet to peak. Some of course have solitude thrust on them. Not everyone can cope with it. But others choose it, seeing in it a value, a source of strength, hitherto untapped. Even among those embarked unwillingly on the solitary path are some who discover that there is more to being alone than loneliness; good things that only the solitary know.

Setsuko Tamura, growing up in her big happy family, knew it all along. Now 86 and a well-known illustrator, she looks back for PHP on her curious childhood revolt against the joys of family conviviality. She is one of several contributors to the magazine’s feature on what may prove a new phase of human evolution. Are we evolving from social animal to solitary animal, from society to solitude?

A budding artist, Tamura longed to get off by herself and draw. She dreamed of Paris, city of art, of the solitary artist in a garret, starving but inspired. She finished high school and, all of 18, left home, moving not to Paris but to a tiny garret-like apartment in her native Tokyo. Suddenly – how bleak it all seemed, that which had dazzled her so in anticipation! “So this is it,” she thought grimly. She’d sit down to her solitary meal, the sounds of social life reaching her through the open window, seeming to mock her for not being part of it. She was a good cook, the food was good, “but no one even to say, ‘It’s delicious’ to!”

Well, it’s what she’d done to herself, she must learn to live with it, and promptly steeled herself to do so. “Come to think of it,” she thought, “all the heroes and heroines of the fairy tales I loved as a child were alone – weren’t they?”

She drew, she sold, she prospered, was successful – and remained alone. The artist in her bloomed. Solitude was the soil. She tended her plant carefully.

She aged, and slowly the people close to her – parents, siblings, friends – died, deepening her soil. Every morning, she writes, one by one, she greets her intimate dead by name: “Good morning!” She reflects on how lucky she is: “My eyes see! My ears hear!” Sad times there certainly are: “I’ve never lived without a cat. The other day my cat ran off and left me. ‘Now,’ I thought, ‘I’m really alone.’ Most people, when loneliness hits hard, shut themselves in. Not me. I go out.”

She goes to Tokyo’s Roppongi, abounding in skyscrapers, chooses one, rides to the top and looks out. “Houses as numerous as the stars, all those lights, all those people, each with his or her own thoughts, own life… It fills me with emotion.” Is one ever alone in such a city? Or should one say: Is one ever more alone than in such a city?

Yoshiaki Hikita, 64, retired four years ago after 37 years with the advertising firm Hakuhodo. There was no sayonara party, no drinks with colleagues, no pats on the back or good wishes. COVID-19 was raging and people were keeping to themselves. One moment a senior employee of a major company, the next he knew not what, or who. His company phone went dead, his company email address was deactivated, and Hikita went out into the world – alone. A network of business connections forged over 37 years was suddenly no more. Could it really have dissolved as rapidly as that?

Try this test, a friend suggested: fill in your mind a classroom-size room with people you know by name and sight – say 35 individuals – and ask yourself: how many of them are close friends? None, thought Hikita in dismay. What then? Start life again, at 60, on a new footing? Why not? When you think of relationships nowadays, with families narrowing if not fading out altogether, with virtual relationships taking precedence over face-to-face ones, it’s a whole new world out there. Why not make a whole new life in it?

Of the shape his is taking Hikita says little. Whatever it is, he seems content. One trap to avoid, he warns himself and us: the tendency to compare ourselves to others and measure our relatedness, happiness, success, worth and so on against those of others, losing heart if we seem to fall behind. There is no “behind” to fall, he says, and no one behind whom to fall; conversely no “ahead” to get either. It’s a good lesson – the reward he drew from the solitude that so abruptly fell on him.

Say what you like about love, friendship, human ties of various sorts with various people, ultimately, it may be, we’re all alone, and the proof, suggests philosopher Ichiro Kishimi in his contribution to PHP’s feature, is pain and the isolation it imposes. However much we love someone, we can’t feel another’s pain, nor can another feel ours. Kishida nursed both his mother and father through harrowing illnesses – a brain hemorrhage in his mother’s case, dementia in his father’s. It deepened his anguish and enriched his philosophy. “What is the sufferer going through?” he asks rhetorically. He at the bedside can see but never really know.

Which is good, he concludes unexpectedly: “It proves we’re free, and as free beings have thoughts and feelings beyond sharing. Communication that’s too easy means we’re all experiencing the same thing – in short, that we’re not free.”

That raises the question of whether freedom has a future in an increasingly uniform world – a topic for another day, perhaps.

© Japan Today