Author: Mieko Kawakami
One of my recent reads was “All the Lovers in the Night” by Mieko Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. With its contemplative, poetic yet restrained style, the 2022 novel feels best suited to late nights or unhurried stretches of reading.
The story follows Fuyuko, a copyeditor in her thirties living a life marked by isolation. Her days pass in careful routine until she meets Mitsutsuka, an older man whose presence subtly begins to alter her perception of the world and of herself.
Fuyuko’s interior life is shaped by fear, hesitation and a profound sense of disconnection, captured in one of the novel’s most arresting lines: “I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I chose nothing. I did nothing.”
Loneliness and the longing for connection sit at the heart of the novel, alongside clear-eyed examination of the ways people wound one another, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes through their own inaction.
