Steadying the spine of the notebook with my palm, I took the pencil to the first blank page and wrote the words: “All the lovers in the night.” The phrase had appeared out of nowhere. Through the faint light of the room, I looked over the words, which came together in the strangest way. On the one hand, they felt new to me, like something I’d never heard or seen before, though I also felt like maybe I had read them somewhere, in the title of a movie or a song, which meant it had emerged from someplace inside of me. Hard to say.
All the Lovers in the Night is the first novel I’ve read by Mieko Kawakami — so, unlike other reviewers, I don’t have any opinions about how this compares to her other work — but I will say that this totally broke my heart. Tense and atmospheric, trapping the reader in the POV of an awkward and lonely soul — who is frequently lectured by other women on how a woman ought to live — I found this novel both emotionally affecting and fascinatingly revelatory of the modern Japanese woman’s experience. Four solid stars for the writing — plot and setting and mood — with the slightest quibbles about the lack of depth in secondary characters. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
If somebody asked me to do a job, and I didn’t want to do it, what was the right way to turn them down? If I thought about things long enough, I would always lose track of my own feelings, which left me with no choice but to proceed as usual, without taking any action. Maybe the girls were right about me having no place else to go, about there being nothing fun about my life. That was when I got a call from Kyoko.
Fuyuko Irie — a mousy young woman from Nagano who went to college in Tokyo before stumbling into a nondescript office job in the city — found herself, in her mid-thirties, bored and lonely; ostracised at work and without friends or family to spend her time off with. When a former manager, Kyoko, asks her if she’d be interested in doing some freelance proofreading, Fuyuko reckons it would at least fill her lonely off-hours. And when the editor that she works with, Hijiri, then asks if she would like to make the freelancing a full-time job, Fuyuko decides that at least she won’t need to be actively ignored in the office anymore. But while Fuyuko does find her new work rewarding (and I did really like Kawakami’s descriptions of how Fuyuko’s work was done: who knew that a proofreader would draw a floorplan of a novel’s setting to check for incongruencies?), by turning her back on her office and her commute, Fuyuko was further sealing herself off from human contact.
Not like I need to tell you this, but proofreading is a lonely business, full of lonely people.
Fuyuko eventually forms an unlikely friendship with the glamorous and popular Hijiri — there’s a definitie power imbalance in their relationship and it can be painful to watch Fuyuko try to interject one word responses into Hijiri’s discourses on life and love — and Fuyuko takes up drinking to try and force herself to go out and experience the world. When she meets an older man who is kind to her — a fellow loveable loser with his receding hairline and faded polo shirts — Fuyuko has stirrings of feelings that are increasingly excruciating to read about. Revelations will eventually be made about the childhood experiences that made Fuyuko the way she is; Fuyuko will have meetings with other women (a powerful businesswoman, a stay-at-home Mom) who will have one-sided conversations about the opportunities and pitfalls of modern life; and nothing in the plot plays out predictably. Most of all, I ached for Fuyuko and her inability to connect with others.
I’m all alone, I thought. I’d been on my own for ages, and I was convinced that there was no way I could be any more alone, but now I’d finally realized how alone I truly was. Despite the crowds of people, and all the different places, and a limitless supply of sounds and colors packed together, there was nothing here that I could reach out and touch. Nothing that would call my name. There never had been, and there never would be. And that would never change, no matter where I went in the world. Surrounded by the grayness of the city, ever grayer in the misty rain, I was unable to move.
I’ve read a lot of Haruki Murakami and particularly enjoy the incidental details he adds about everyday life in Japan, so while I noted those same interesting details in this novel, I was really trying to be conscious about not exoticising the setting: this is a real place where people’s lives play out, and as a background for Kawakami to explore her characters’ reality, I found this equally interesting as a work of Japanese feminist fiction and as a story of the common human struggle for connection and meaning. I’m looking forward to reading more from Kawakami in the future.
