All the Lovers in the Night

 

All the Lovers in the Night / Mieko Kawakami
trans. from the Japanese by Sam Bett & David Boyd
NY: Europa, 2022, c2014.
224 p.

And another Japanese novel with a bookish main character! Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties - she is very isolated and has contact mainly with her assigning editor Hijiri, a woman about the same age but who is very different than Fuyuko. They start meeting for lunches and Fuyuko tells Hijiri she doesn't drink, unlike Hijiri, who likes to get drunk, likes to get together with various men, and who dresses stylishly and has perfect hair and makeup. 

One day Fuyuko catches a glimpse of herself in a window and sees dull and drab. She decides she needs to shake things up. But the way she decides to do this is to start drinking on her own, heavily and regularly. She spends much of the rest of the book drunk, tipsy or in a similar state, even when she decides that she wants to register for a class at the continuing education centre. She goes there but is so drunk she ends up throwing up on an older man's feet as she runs to the bathroom. But the next time she goes back, he's there again and doesn't seem to hold it against her. In fact he helps her out, as she's drunk again, and they start meeting regularly at a café just to talk. 

Fuyuko falls in love with him, and questions everything about her own life. She's ready to settle in with this man (although he doesn't know it yet) and give up her friendship with Hijiri. But that's not the way things actually turn out. So much in her life is illusion, and what she thinks is reality, is in fact the opposite. After she goes through this strange self-examination of drunkenness she finds herself in much the same position, on the outside, as she was at the beginning, but has finally opened up to life, on the inside.

This was a strange book for me. I kept waiting for something to actually happen, and for Fuyuko to have some kind of epiphany. But the big moment only comes near the end when she writes down the words that are the title of this book, realizing that they are the first words of her own she has written in years. I'm not sure what that indicates exactly; I feel the influence of earlier writers like Banana Yoshimoto here but there's not as much emotional warmth in the story. I wasn't a fan of Fuyuko; her character wanted to find something for herself but didn't do anything about it, getting stalled and self-sabotaging at every turn. In the end it seems like she just went with the flow again, albeit with a better state of mind. The constant drinking as a solution mystified me. Why did she suddenly go from tee-totaller to drunk? And what was this supposed to say? 

As you see, I wasn't fully caught up in this one. I wanted to finish it and see where it was going, but there was not enough action (whether interior or in plot) and no real resolution, for me anyhow.