A song by Yonezu Kenshi made me think about what adults quietly hide 🐧
On an ordinary trip home, Spotify started playing Yonezu Kenshi's song "Raven" for me.
The moment I heard the intro, for some reason I remembered a summer from when I was a kid. A view like the blue sky of Japan, the kind I used to look up at right beside a park.
There are 2 lyrics that hit me.
星の名前を知るたび
僕らは大人になった
誰にも渡せない秘密が１つずつ増えてった。Every time we learned the name of a star,
we became adults.
One more secret that we could never hand to anyone
kept piling up, one at a time.— Yonezu Kenshi, "Raven"
I get it...!! The older you get, the more things pile up that you can not tell anyone.
Why did I do that back then, things like that. The faces of people I never repaid, or someone I ended up betraying.
A version of my own story that I can not really call clean quietly keeps piling up.
From now on, I want to live sincerely, and make choices I can find both cool and beautiful.
There is one more lyric that struck me.
人が嫌いなあの子に
気づけば子供ができた
同じ夢を見てたあいつは
心を壊していたTo that kid who hated people,
before I knew it, she had a child.
That guy who had the same dream as I did
had broken down inside.— Yonezu Kenshi, "Raven"
At the last line, the one who had broken down inside, I thought, "wait, is this about me?"
I really have had a few times when my heart almost broke down.
My friends from elementary and middle school probably think I am the kind of person who is always fine, for life.
People whose hearts have broken down do not really post about it.
So maybe it is just invisible, and there are actually quite a lot of us.
By the way, apparently this song was made as the soccer theme for a Japanese TV station's coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.