When Hijiri, her editor, asks Fuyoko Irie to tell her something about herself, Irie couldn’t think of anything worth sharing. “My name is Fuyoku Irie, a freelance proofreader, 34-year-old…I like to go out on a walk once a year on my birthday, Christmas Eve, in the middle of the night…The full extent of what I could tell her about myself.” This passage, 40-odd pages into the book, sums up what the book is all about. The loneliness is palpable, the melancholy a soft background score, and the prose a dream to read on.
It’s hard not to be reminded of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, while reading Meiko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night. In both the books, the protagonist is a socially awkward female having
a mundane work life, one who leaves you with a strong desire to offer comfort.
Kawakami brings us Irie, who is as lonely as the parenthesis she puts in her manuscripts. Just like those dashes or brackets, Irie’s life in Tokyo can be summed up in a few phrases, an afterthought that keeps coming up while she struggles to forget her traumatic past. Until she meets a man named Mitstsuska and her life changes for the better or, perhaps, worse.
The Japanese struggle with loneliness is well documented. In 2021, Japan appointed its first Minister of Loneliness, who announced plans to tackle social isolation. The author brings to the fore the loneliness faced not just by Irie, but the fiercely independent Hijiri too. Dramatically opposite, Hijiri, an outspoken and a neo-liberal feminist, is battling another sort of isolation—one impinged upon by society on single women. In this novel, Kawakami also presents a world of working women riding high on success, often at the cost of pushing each other down. The society’s sharp identification of women and expectations of their moral conduct also comes out neatly in this novel. In a few sentences, Hijiri describes it well when she says why her mother has stopped talking to her. “In her world, an unmarried woman having a kid on her own is worse than murder. She’s just like, after all I did to raise you, how the hell did you turn out like this? Imagine saying that to your own daughter—who’s practically 40, by the way.”
The book remarkably strikes a chord in its depiction of how women are perceived by society, or the harm women can inflict on their own gender. Like when Irie runs into a childhood acquaintance who tells her how motherhood had tied her down, only to part with the advice that Irie should have kids of her own. The irony of her words is not lost on anyone, least of all on Irie who vaguely dreams of domestic bliss.
Kawakami’s novels are known for her strong feminine characters. She was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for her novel Heaven. In All the Lovers in the Night, painful memories from the past offer a beauty of hope, even when it stays withus fleetingly.