All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

In the sound of the shower or the tub, in the spray of water on the dishes in the sink, I heard the words that Mitsutsuka and I had shared, as well as all the words that we were yet to share. We'd only met up a handful of times, which made it harder to understand how I could feel like this. I didn't know the first thing about him. I couldn't even see inside my feelings far enough to know what they meant. Over and over, i asked myself if this had all been some kind of mistake. If I sat down with a cup of sake and thought about how weird it was that I spent so much time thinking about someone I didn't even know, I just wound up thinking about him anyway. I thought about him all the time.

Mieko Kawakami's All the Lovers in the Night is about Fuyuko, a young fact-checker who lives a lonely and isolated life. She's awkward around others, and doesn't make friends easily. In fact, they mostly have to make her: first Hijiri, the brash editor who encourages Fuyuko to go freelance, and introduces her to alcohol for the first time. Then there's Mitsutsuka, an unassuming older high school science teacher whose life collides with Fuyuko's when, plastered and investigating taking courses at a local college, she ends up puking everywhere. (Fuyuko's alcoholism, unwittingly provoked by Hijiri, is a major theme in the novel.) Mitsutsuka is kind, shy, reserved--exactly the kind of person, one thinks, that might pull Fuyuko out of her funk. Her feelings for him are identifiable to us as romantic, but with her diminished experience, she struggles to make sense of them, fleeing into drink or just plain fleeing.

In the center of the book, Kawakami places a flashback that explains everything we need to know about Fuyuko. She recounts how, in high school, a seemingly gentle and thoughtful boy cast his attentions on her, calling her once a week on the phone. But the first time this boy invited Fuyuko to his house, he ends up raping her and then cruelly dismissing her. Kawakami describes this scene with a painful clarity that is difficult to read. But it's clear we're meant to see this as something as a key to Fuyuko's adult strangeness: how can she reach out to others, when doing so leads to such cruel disasters? Other than this scene, All the Lovers in the Night is a quiet and uneventful book, only as big in scope as Fuyuko's shrunken life. The three central figures are well drawn, and I especially liked the ambiguity of the character of Hijiri, whose social prodding of Fuyuko is somehow both supportive and menacing at the same time; a scene where Hijiri gives Fuyuko her old designer clothes, and Fuyuko looks at her new self in the mirror, was especially effective, when it might have been obvious.

One thing that struck me when I read this, and thinking back to Kawakami's book Heaven, about a boy who is cruelly bullied, is that she shares a lot of qualities with once and future it-girl Otessa Moshfegh. The protagonist here reminds me of the heroines of books like Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, recluses who shun, or are shunned by, a wider world in which they feel unable to operate. Kawakami's book is much quieter, even compared to Heaven there's nothing really here that's shocking or lurid. That compares favorably to Moshfegh, I think, even as I think the book itself will end up being not quite memorable.