Anri’s song gives an uncontrollable feeling a form that other people can enter.
Two titles for one song can lead into neighboring rooms. “Kanashimi ga Tomaranai” names sadness that does not stop. “I Can’t Stop the Loneliness” introduces an explicit “I” and a different, though related, feeling. Sadness need not come from solitude; loneliness need not announce itself as sadness. The names do not have to correct one another. Their slight displacement makes room for listeners who first recognize an emotion and listeners who first recognize the experience of having little authority over it.
Anri’s single appeared on November 5, 1983, before joining Timely!! that December. Chinfa Kan wrote the words, Tetsuji Hayashi the music; Toshiki Kadomatsu and Hayashi share the arrangement credit. The joint credit deserves to remain intact. An apparently individual emotion becomes a reproducible work through differentiated labor. Writing, organizing, and singing are not interchangeable responsibilities. The listener receives a whole partly because those distinctions have been allowed to do their work.
Popular music’s contribution to sadness is not necessarily to cure it. We can be too quick to ask whether a song helps somebody move on, as though a feeling proves it has been properly attended to only by ending promptly. Giving it time and shape is already consequential. A song begins, finishes, and can be played again; the experience it accommodates need not obediently complete the same circuit. A bounded work and an emotion without a clear endpoint coexist. That mismatch may be part of how musical company becomes possible.
A finished performance consequently need not imply a person who has regained command of life. A feeling can be clearly expressed while remaining difficult to manage. Expression and control are different abilities. Listening well also leaves room for other people’s unfamiliar experiences inside a familiar piece, rather than making one emotional label explain everyone. The Japanese title’s unstated subject and the English title’s explicit “I” offer different entrances into that possibility.
What the song makes available may be a grammatical accommodation rather than an answer. Someone can acknowledge the limit of their present control without becoming reducible to that limit. A title can describe a condition without issuing a lifetime verdict. Ordinary life continues after the recording ends; for these few minutes, improvement does not have to be performed before a difficult feeling can be heard.