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. 

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

I entertained an incredible scenario where Ninomiya and his friends had somehow forgotten all about me.

When summer was over, I would how up at school to find their memories of me erased. My arrival would provoke no feeling or emotion, nothing. Something would have happened to them over the break. they would be entirely different people, no longer interested in me at all. I knew that it was cruel to be so optimistic, but, in my solitude, I couldn't resist the urge and spent entire days basking in idiotic fantasies, sometimes verging on prayer. The longer I stayed in the house the more that everything at school felt like a fragment of some story I had stumbled upon when I was young. As if none of that had anything to do with who I had become.

The narrator of Mieko Kawakami's Heaven is mercilessly bullied at school. The bullying is not just name-calling, not just mental, but physical: his tormentors force him to eat chalk, then clean up his own vomit. They beat him again and again but somehow never leave marks. In one horrible scene, they place a torn volleyball over his head and treat him like a human soccerball. The narrator--whom they call "Eyes" because of his lazy eye--submits to this, because he knows that things will only be worse for him if he protests, or fights back. One day, when he finds a note pasted under his desk by someone wanting to be his friend, he thinks it's another cruel joke. But as it turns out, it's Kojima, a girl who is also bullied, who seeks him out, seeing a kindred spirit.

His budding friendship with Kojima transforms the narrator's life. Though they never speak at school, their letters, and their secret meetings, become a bright spot in the misery of his tortured life. Kojima explains that the things that make her the target of bullies--she rarely washes, is dirty and smells bad--are meant to be "signs" of the life of poverty she once led with her father, before her mother remarried a rich man. For Kojima, there is a secret and profound meaning in the way that she and the narrator are bullied. Their weakness means something, and their refusal to fight back has a kind of moral force that gives them superiority over their tormentors. In contrast, one of the narrator's bullies, a laconic boy named Momose, tells him that there is no meaning in any of it: people do what they have the will and the power to do, and no more. At the novel's climax, when the two friends are discovered and the bullying reaches a pitch of newfound intensity and danger, the narrator begins to suspect that these two attitudes are somehow two sides of the same coin. That is, perhaps they are both ways of justifying the unjustifiable, and extending it.

Heaven is not for the faint of heart. At its core are some of the oldest questions: why do people suffer? Why do people inflict suffering? The violence of the novel is vivid and unflinching; it is at times a difficult read. It made me think of Toni Morrison's assertion in the introduction to The Bluest Eye that there is no way to write the book from the point of view of the tortured Pecola, as well as Dorothee Soelle's chilling assertion that there are kinds of suffering that are beyond human expression and explanation. That the narrator can give his story suggests, in some small way, that there is an escaped hatch, and forebodingly, it is difficult to imagine the novel written from the perspective of the increasingly haggard and paranoid Kojima. We may be touched by the tender friendship between the two, but even this is not inviolable, and there is no guarantee that a release for one might be a release for both. This might be the most troubling aspect of a troubling novel.