Read #162

Mieko Kawakami: All The Lovers In The Night (trans: by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

This is the third Kawakami novel translated into English, and the third I have read: they are spectacularly good. The writing is beautiful, and slightly oblique. Her main subject has been, so far, young women, often quiet, anxious young women, unsure of how to get through life – things seem to them confusing, challenging, often too brash, or insensitive. They quietly go about their daily life trying to be as little noticed was possible.

Fuyuko is a proof reader. At the start of the book she is with a firm, but she doesn’t speak to anyone there, and they have long ago given up asking her out for social drinks. She is a good worker – it seems to take up an unhealthy amount of her spare time, as she literally seems to do nothing else. Hijiri, was her boss and becomes her boss / benefactor as she persuades Fuyuko to go freelance, when she sees that she can earn the same money – if not more – and need never meet anyone, she can do the work at home, or in the corner of a cafe or library.

In her mid-30s, Fuyuko has had sex once. A painful, horribly confused teenage fumble that became a rape. Since then she has had no sexual interest in anyone. Fuyuko sees a reflection of herself and is brought to a state of shock…she cannot quantify what it is she thinks she has become, but it is not what she expected.

Her one concession to ‘stepping out’ of her flat for pleasure rather than necessity is on her birthday which is Christmas Eve, every year, she goes for a solo walk through the night streets of the town she lives in. Until one year a chance encounter with a man twenty years her senior changes things. They begin to meet for coffee and conversation once a week every week.

It is a subtle, gentle and beautiful study of a woman trying to understand herself, what she has become, and whether she likes herself.

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 in the room, I looked over the words, which came together in the strangest way…seeing my handwriting under the light, I realised that this was the first time I’d written something without having a specific purpose, not a comment in someone else’s manuscript or galley, but my own words on a blank sheet of paper. I had no clue what to do with these words, no idea what they were for, or what they meant, but I stared at them and felt them reach my heart and linger there.