Video of the Week: Haku–“Mono No Aware”

The young Okinawan 4-piece girl group Haku set the internet on fire with a video of the band covering a song called “Mono No Aware”.

As the performance, which is essentially a string of tongue twisters in Japanese, was presumably recorded on a lark, there is (so far at least) no official release of the song by the band.

Since the video has become the addiction of viewers from Asia to Mexico and seemingly everywhere else, the inability of fans to satisfy their craving by downloading or adding the tune to a playlist is a perfect example of the concept of mono no aware, a term meaning “a sensitivity to ephemera” or “a Japanese concept that describes an awareness of impermanence and the beauty found in the fleeting nature of existence, often evoking a gentle sadness or wistfulness”.

For CD collectors (ahem) it’s enough to drive one crazy–or of course to develop one’s sense of mono no aware.

But in the absence of downloads or hard copies, the video is, as the kids say, “everything”.