Review of All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett

*Like All the Lovers in the Night* by Mieko Kawakami (2022). Published by Europa Editions.

I have never read Breasts and Eggs, and while I plan to, I do not see myself getting to it eventually. I’ve never read any of Kawakami’s short stories or books, but what lured me into this was the title.

That is right: I was obsessed with the title. I found it to be so poetic that I immediately looked it up on my local library system and ordered a copy to be sent to my local branch. It arrived within a couple of days, and after picking up a copy of Shin Kyung-sook’s Violets (out by Feminist Press in 2022), I cracked open this book.

Like Violets, it, too, is a very short read. It clocks in at about 200 pages, but because of the way the pages are spaced, and the fact that the book itself is pretty small when it comes to dimensions, it goes by quickly.

I finished the book in about an hour and a half, and, for reference,I usually finish two hundred and fifty page novels in two hours. I am fairly consistent, so this is a good indicator. I was then lured by the fact on the book jacket it said that the main character was someone who copyedits, so I felt like this is something I could potentially relate to? More on that later.

Let us begin the review!

A thirty-six-year-old copyeditor in Tokyo lives a lonely, isolated life after becoming a freelancer.

Our main character in All the Lovers in the Night is Fuyuko, who is in her mid-thirties and just left her office job to become a freelancer. She describes how she does not like her office job because the other people in the office consider her to be strange, and that the younger girls gossip about her while literally directly in front of her.

The backdrop of this is Tokyo, as mentioned above, and as we all tend to know about urban fast-paced centers is that it’s really hard to make friends in these kinds of environments, especially when you are an older person. The only person she actually talks to is Hijiro, her editor.

Fuyuko wants to change her life, and this is what the novel is kind of about. She tries to go and sign up for a class, one she picked at random from the abundant amount of flyers she gets, and she meets this man who claims he is a physics teacher.

Fuyuko never ends up signing up for a class, but instead she gets a different kind of schooling through the man, who is older than her. They meet every Thursday at a cafe and discuss abstract concepts like light and physics, and even though their interactions are pretty innocent, there is quite a bit of underlying sexual tension.

Eventually Fuyuko does open up with these interactions with the man, and even meets with one of her high school classmates at one point. The high school classmate complains about her married life, providing a different kind of mirror to the life Fuyuko could be living.

While she is miserable by herself, the introduction of the high school friend proves that even with someone that is married, they still are feeling lonely and inadequate in their daily life. It’s a constant cycle affecting everyone, even those who have seem to have quote-on-quote made it in the expectations of society.

The man does eventually disappear after they confess their feelings for each other—that the sexual tension was indeed there the entire time—and on the night of Fuyuko’s birthday, he disappears completely from her life.

I interpreted this fact as an extended factor of the light images they discussed briefly—light shines on an object for only a brief time in the night, and it is pretty easy to love track love or lovers in the midst of darkness. I saw the man as the interpretation of a false light shining at the end of the tunnel, teaching Fuyuko that she can have relationships outside of her editor.

I found the fact that the man she meets up and eventually falls in love with was a lost dreamer like her to really drive in the points that the novel makes home.

He doesn’t have anyone either, and when he stops showing up at the cafe on the night of her birthday, she eventually receives a letter in the mail saying that he lied, that he worked in a factory and never a high school physics teacher.

I found his loneliness to be a different breed in itself, one that came out of the need to reinvent one’s self in order to feel accepted. Fuyuko didn’t really do that with him, but he serves as a different kind of foil for her.

The writing in this novel is very fluid, and it takes its time in order to drive home the images, thoughts, and character’s actions. While you may fly through the book while getting to the end, the words themselves are at a leisure pace.

I think I will read more of Kawakami because of this, and because I like the way that she focuses on female characters. We need more of that in the world.

Overall Thoughts

I will say it is a good book. But does that mean I love it? Not really. I think it offers a lot of value in the perspective of Fuyuko, especially when contrasting to her girlboss editor Hijiro and the stay-at-home mom that just took her Disneyland trip.

It is an important piece of literature to look back when it comes to look at overarching themes in society, as it takes the perspective of a lonely woman and puts her in the world of a freelancer living in Tokyo. I say definitely pick it up and form an opinion for yourself, go to your local library, as it won’t be too long of a read.