All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami Review by Michael Hahn

All the Lovers in the Night

Book by Mieko Kawakami

Published by Europa Editions

Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Review by Michael Hahn

ISBN: 1609456998

224 pages

Light and Rhythm in Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night

I once watched a live performance of Ravel’s Bolero from my favorite cheap seat behind the Los Angeles Philharmonic, from where I could closely observe the musicians as they prepared for their moments to shine. Known for its recurring melody and a rhythmic ostinato that undergirds the piece throughout its fifteen minutes, Bolero is a marathon for the drummer, whose task of repeating the same staccato motif (169 times) is the most arduous one of all. And yet the most riveting part, beyond the drummer’s austerity, was his stark solitude. Beneath the sonic fray, his rhythm was whole and remained unchanged. 

In Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night, Fuyuko Irie is an embodied ostinato, an introverted proofreader in her thirties who keeps to herself and on each birthday prefers to walk alone at night. “The light at night is special,” she says, “Because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright” (Kawakami, 9).  Shunned by her coworkers, whose “indifference…showed hints of bitterness, which became apparent in their silence and their looks” (Kawakami, 14), Fuyuko takes on a freelance job through an old colleague, proofreading manuscripts for a publisher. The arrangement suits her; she keeps her solitude and engages in work where “the idea is to keep our emotions out of it.” Fuyuko prefers to keep her own private rhythm, whole and unchanged, in life.  

However, her new supervisor, Hijiri, who has a similar fixation on work, proves to be a foil for the insular Fuyuko. Hijiri is attractive and intelligent, never backs down from a fight. Though both are the same age and from the same city (Nagano), Fuyuko notes, “Aside from these two points and our gender, I couldn’t find anything else we had in common.” And yet: “For some reason she was very kind to me” (Kawakami, 20). Their odd coupling is a catalyst for Fuyuko’s sense of discovery—of the world and of herself. 

Though she is drawn out by degrees, Fuyuko maintains a unique sensitivity to the world around her—as light during her birthday night walks gleam “as if pieces of the world before my eyes were telling me some kind of story…contained a secret meaning that only I could understand” (Kawakami, 30). It is a receptivity that she uses as personal totem, saying of Hijiri, “A unique aura surrounded her, something like a special layer of light that gave her a brightness greater than the space around her” (Kawakami, 19).  However, that receptivity is emblematic of a consuming passiveness in Fuyuko. She is laconic, barely responding to her friends beyond a nod and a one-word assent. At the center of the novel, she reveals deep trauma in which her agency was ripped away from her, leaving her “horribly flat and without depth, no more than a drawing on a piece of cardstock” (Kawakami, 121).

Kawakami’s prose is evocative and precise, immersing the Reader in Furyuko’s hermetic world. Upon the joy of completing her manuscript, Fuyuko beholds “the railings on the balconies of the apartment building down the street, the glossy roof tiles of the houses, the deep green leaves of the cherry trees and the drooping telephone wires trembled in the dazzling sun” (Kawakami, 47). At the bar where she meets Hijiri, “the ambient lighting defined the contours of [Hijiri’s] plump, shapely lips, which looked so full of life that they could have hopped off her face and walked around at any moment” (Kawakami, 38). 

The narrative lens also frequently doubles back on the Narrator. As she speaks to her colleague, Fuyuko notes, “I took a sip of my black tea, then closed my lips and nodded a few times” (Kawakami, 17). Speaking with Hijiri, she notes, “Dark waves rolled through my chest, and I wiped my fingertips over and over with the oshibori on the table” (Kawakami 23). In these moments, it as if Fuyuko is proofreading her own life, without emotion, without empathy. Splitting the Narrator into subject and object, Kawakami achieves an affective dissociation within Fuyuko, one that reaches its climax as the character stares at her own reflection— “Just a miserable woman, who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day like this” (Kawakami, 50). Short of a diagnosis, the distance creates a psychic tension, a desire for the protagonist to inhabit her own self, fully and with dignity.

But when Fuyuko encounters Mitsuzaka, an unassuming 58-year-old man who shows her kindness, she begins to step out of that dislocation and into her emotional depth, albeit aided by alcohol. By this time, Kawakami has already immersed the Reader into Fuyuko’s psyche—a withered flower having needed a chance to bloom. And when Mitsuzaka, who lends her a recording of Chopin’s Berceuse—a song (also with an ostinato) that means “lullaby”—the Reader empathizes with her, wonders whether the encounter will further infantalize her in a stunted youth—or, as Fuyuko relates a childhood reverie which she once imagined herself a fierce, but sleepy lioness—fulfill a long-repressed dream. 

In the hands of any other author, the story of a hermetic proofreader might never attain the climax that it does in All the Lovers in the Night, and the treatment of sexual trauma at the center of the story might end up reductive, tropic. Kawakami’s characters can feel didactic and instrumentalized—especially with the reticent Fuyuko, the friends she encounters do most of the talking while she mostly demurs. However, the Author, as demonstrated in novels such as Heaven, employs such characters to bring out the contractions of her tormented protagonists. By way of her narrative control, Kawakami, plays the full spectrum of Fuyuko’s hedged-in life—and in so doing, reveals an emergence, like the ostinato in Chopin’s Berceuse, that is subtle and yet arresting in its denouement.

Mieko Kawakami is the acclaimed author of the international bestseller Breasts and Eggs. Born in Osaka, Japan, Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet and published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, in 2007. Kawakami’s literary awards include the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. Heaven, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is on the shortlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he received the 2019-2020 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for his translation of Star by Yukio Mishima. Together with David Boyd, he is also a translator of Kawakami’s novels Breasts and Eggs and Heaven, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated novels and stories by Hiroko Oyamada, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017) won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Together with Sam Bett, he is the translator of Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs.

Michael Hahn is an essayist and short fiction writer from Los Angeles, California. His work can be found in Water~Stone, Phoebe, and Tiferet Journal. He is currently in the low-residency MFA in Writing program at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

4 January 2023