Manon calls in from Oamaru to give her latest review!
All the Lovers in the Night (2011, trans. Sam Bett, David Boyd) is the newly translated novel from Mieko Kawakami, one of Japan’s most exciting writers.
It’s the story of Fuyuko, a 34-year-old woman working as a freelance proof-reader in Tokyo. She lives an extremely isolated, lonely life, barely leaving her apartment, bewildered by the world, yearning for connection but terrified to experience it. As the book goes on, we learn about a horrifically painful rupture in her earlier life. One day she meets Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher who shares her fascination with the properties of light, and Fuyuko begins to be seen by somebody and begin a quiet transformation. It’s a crushing heartbreaker of a book, but offers so much about the way we shape each other. As Kawakami herself has said, we don’t always find hope in light books, and we don’t always find despair in the dark ones.
Manon’s full review is with Rachel is below.
