To the lighthouse: urban solitude and mediated relationships in Akunin, by Yoshida Shūichi

In his literature, Yoshida Shūichi (Nagasaki, 1968) presents a critique of contemporary urban life as an alienating experience occurring in delocalized and dehumanized spaces; his acclaimed novel Akunin (Villain, 2007) depicts secondary cities and peripheries where mobile phones, websites, dating services, street networks and mass media mark the edges of a postmodern cartography of urban Japan whose main features are an inescapable sense of solitude, the complexity of intersubjectivity and human relationships and the segmentation of selfhood. Authors of the last decades appear specifically concerned with solitude, and Yoshida represents a telling example of this tendency, because solitude is, in his works, first and foremost the incapacity and unwillingness to deal with otherness: such a pessimistic view conveys a profoundly critical stance vis-à-vis the current state of global communities and raises key questions about the meaning of life and emotions in contemporary society.