All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami
About the author
Mieko Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006, and published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth and the World, in 2007.
Born in 1976 in Osaka, Japan, Kawakami is the author of the internationally bestselling novel, Breasts and Eggs, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of TIME’s Best 10 Books of 2020. Her writing is known for its poetic qualities and its insights into the female body, ethical questions, and the dilemmas of modern society.
Her works have been translated into many languages and are available all over the world. She has received numerous prestigious literary awards in Japan for her work, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. She lives in Tokyo.
Review
Jo Hamya
Saturday 30 April, 2022
New York Times
In Mieko Kawakami’s latest, a woman tries to shed her loneliness by drinking a lot.
Twice in Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night, a 34-year-old proofreader, Fuyuko Irie, receives a pale yellow bottle of perfume by the luxury brand Chloé. Both bottles are gifts from work friends: first the glamorous Hijiri, an outspoken neoliberal feminist who shows her affection by regularly commissioning Fuyuko for freelance jobs; and then Kyoko, an editor at the Tokyo publishing house that Fuyuko quits at the start of the novel, to work alone.
For the uninitiated, Chloé scents are characteristically inoffensive and lovely — soft, powdery and marketed as “quintessentially feminine,” with ads featuring tousled, natural-looking models. Over drinks one night, Hijiri notices Fuyuko isn’t wearing makeup, and asks her, “You’re not one of those natural types, are you?” Not one of those women who are “all like, oh, I’m so natural, just being the me I’m supposed to be.” Kawakami’s third book to be translated into English, by Sam Bett and David Boyd — after last year’s Heaven, and Breasts and Eggs in 2020 — hinges on this double bind created by the feminine ideal: the gloom spawned by a woman’s inevitable failure to measure up to impossible standards of beauty and likability, coupled with a lack of any other available framework through which she can view herself or her peers.
Fuyuko suffers this in extremis. With few friends, no hobbies and a lonely career hunting for minute mistakes in book manuscripts, she is mocked by other women for her drab appearance and her utter lack of social skills, family life or romantic life. At work she sacrifices her own interests and curiosities in the service of established rules of grammar, spelling and fact-checking — a rigidity that mirrors her approach to life overall.
This mockery does not, however, stop her from privately judging others on the basis of their weight, age, clothing and social norms. At the novel’s first major turning point, she catches sight of her reflection in a window on a summer’s day, sunken-eyed and disheveled. “What I saw in the reflection was myself,” she observes, “just a miserable woman, who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day like this, on her own in the city.” Soon after, Fuyuko tries to mimic Hijiri’s alcohol consumption by forcing herself to drink beer and sake, gradually but deliberately, in order to loosen up — or as she puts it, “to let go of my usual self.” In an intoxicated attempt at self-improvement, Fuyuko signs up for classes at a university, and ends up vomiting in its main hall. There, she is rescued by a male physics teacher, Mitsutsuka. The two establish a tentative friendship, meeting weekly to discuss Chopin’s Berceuse and the properties of light until a quiet, seemingly mutual attraction forms. Outside of these meetings, Fuyuko continues to adjust to freelance work while drinking copiously.
There is a cleverness with which All the Lovers in the Night addresses these changes, romantic and professional, in its protagonist’s life. By including alcoholism among them, Kawakami circumvents the shtick of stale “glow-up” narratives, and preserves Fuyuko as a cipher: still awkward and miserable for most of the novel, but better attuned to the false offerings and self-enforced hypocrisies endured by her sex.
A reunion with Kyoko later in the book becomes laced with delicious irony, as her friend’s congratulations on Fuyuko’s new career autonomy warps into a criticism of Hijiri for pursuing the same. “There are lots of people who want to put themselves out there, competing for the spotlight,” Kyoko says, “which makes more problems for the rest of us. But you don’t have to worry about that, because you’re not like that.” Kyoko repeats rumours about Hijiri’s sex life (“she has no self-control”), attributing her assertiveness to her good looks. “All the go-getters like her,” she says, “they put so much pressure on the women around them. … She’s convinced all the men, and all her peers, that the women in the office need to live up to her example and look pretty while they’re at it.” Immediately after Kyoko denounces Hijiri comes the revelation that their shared choice of perfume binds them to the same beauty standard.
Yet what makes Kawakami’s novel so brilliant is an understanding of why women might willingly adhere to regressive modes of performative femininity, even while they criticise it. The desire to be loved is no small thing. Fuyuko is skeptical of a life diminished by gendered expectation — at one point, a childhood acquaintance tells Fuyuko that motherhood has robbed her of financial independence and a sense of self, while, in the same breath, urging Fuyuko to have kids — and yet, the allure of a life with Mitsutsuka is enough to make her try. Perhaps influenced by recurring dreams in which a version of herself lives in happy domestic bliss but then transforms into Hijiri, Fuyuko attends her first (and final) official date with Mitsutsuka in Hijiri’s clothes, her hair blown out, makeup done.
The climactic tragedy in All the Lovers in the Night is not Mitsutsuka’s unsettling revelation after this date, but a quiet, cruel phrase from Hijiri that deliberately echoes a trauma Fuyuko experienced in her teens. Kawakami’s novel is uncompromisingly candid in its appraisal of the harm women inflict on one another, while never losing sight of the overarching structures that lead them to do so in the first place. Compact and supple, it’s a strikingly intelligent feat.