Name: den's review of All The Lovers In The Night by Mieko Kawakami
Item: All The Lovers In The Night
Rating: 3
Author: den

Mieko Kawakami

Shy, lonely and introverted Fuyuko lives alone and fills her days with her job as a freelance proofreader. About to turn thirty-five, she cannot imagine ever having any emotional or successful relationship in her life as it currently stands. She is regularly haunted by encounters of the past. But Fuyuko loves the light and goes out on the night of her birthday, Christmas Eve, to count the lights. Her only friend, Hijiri, offers some light in her life, but it is a chance encounter with another man, Mr. Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher, who offers her access from another dimension to light. Pulsing, poetic, modern and shocking, The Night Belongs to Lovers is the third novel from internationally bestselling author Mieko Kawakami.

All The Lovers In The Night

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.

As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.

All the Lovers in the Night

maia

"It's not like I want people to hate me. I'm just not about to go out of my way to make them like me, either. Being liked is wonderful and all, but that's not what life is about, you know?"

wow Hijiri really figured out the fomo theory

"Anyway, it's fine. Everyone should just do whatever they want, myself included. But I can't stand it when you're just talking, then out of nowhere, someone's pushing that stuff on you. It puts me in a real mood. They're all so sure that they're the ones who have seen the light, and it's the only identity they've got, so they can't keep their mouths shut. They're always so loud about it, too, like they need you to see how happy they are. And they walk away feeling great about themselves, because they were generous enough to share the secret to their happiness with everybody. Anyway, they just want to feel superior. It's like Some superficial celebrity complex, you know?"

"I don't know. Everybody's really into horoscopes and fortunes, aren't they?" 

"Whether they come true or not isn't the point." Hijiri took a sip of her beer. They only ever write stuff that people want to hear. All that matters is that you believe this thing is written about you. People just want to read something about themselves.”

"Even though all of our experience tells us that there's no such thing as a book with zero mistakes, we still aim for that perfect book, don't we? A perfect book with no errors at all. And maybe it's a battle that we're bound to lose before we even start, but it's not like we have any other choice, right?"

The thing about results whether or not something turns out well-is that it's mostly about luck. Things like that can change. You can make people believe whatever you want. You can fool them like it's nothing. But you can't fool yourself, not really. That's why what matters is how you think about your work lifetime, how much you respect it, how hard youre trying. Or tried. 

How did I pass the stretch of several hours that came night after night before I went to sleep? And how did I fill the vast expanse of time before starting my workday?

The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.

Bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami invites readers back into her immediately recognizable fictional world with this new, extraordinary novel and demonstrates yet again why she is one of today's most uncategorizable, insightful, and talented novelists. Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it. As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko's past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.

nicole

But I asked myself: Haven’t you always done your best with whatever you were up against? Haven’t you given it your all, whatever came your way? Unfortunately, no. That’s not how things had been for me. I had faked it the whole way. In all those years of doing whatever I was told to do, I had convinced myself that I was doing something consequential, in order to make excuses for myself, as I was doing right now, and perpetually dismissed the fact that I’d done nothing with my life, glossing over it all. I was so scared of being hurt that I’d done nothing. I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I chose nothing. I did nothing.

When it comes to love, the only weapon that we’ve got is our emotions, right? So what can you do when your foundation’s all messed up? If that’s the state you’re in, there’s no way you can ever get serious with anybody.

Do I need to have thoughts all the time? 

“It’s not like I want people to hate me. I’m just not about go out of y way to make them like me, either. Being liked is wonderful and all, but that’s not what life is about, you know?” 

“Some writers are great, but not successful. Then you get other writers are successful, but not so great. I’m sure there’s some sort of special principle behind it. Then again, I guess there are things like that everywhere. We get this all the time as women, right? Like, if you make plenty of money but don’t have any kids, you might get called successful. But unless you have kids, no one will ever call you a great woman. You know what I mean?” 

Brett Lister

No matter where or how I looked, I knew that l would never find the time that we had spent together. 

Imie Kent-Muller

I took the pencil to the first blank page and wrote the words: "All the lovers in the night." The phrase had appeared out of nowhere. Through the faint light of the room, I looked over the words, which came together in the strangest way. On the one hand, they felt new to me, like something I'd never heard or seen before, though I also felt like maybe I had read them somewhere, in the title of a movie or a song, which meant it had emerged from someplace inside of me. Hard to say. Seeing my handwriting under the light, I realized that this was the first time l'd written something without having a specific purpose, not a comment in somebody else's manuscript or galley, but my own words on a blank sheet of paper. I had no clue what to do with these words, no idea what they were for, or what they meant, but I stared at them and felt them reach my heart and linger there. When I was done, I closed the notebook and switched off the light to find a shallow darkness spreading behind my eyelids. Now that the light was gone, I closed my eves softly, knowing it would only be a short time until the light came back in the morning.

In my chair, I surrendered myself to a world of sound that could only be described as sparkling. It made my head sway, and my breath grew deeper as my legs climbed up that evanescent staircase, each step a sheet of light. They would shimmer to life the second my sole made contact, then fizzle into stardust when I lifted my foot, only to be reborn as yet another step, gently showing me the way. That slowly winding spiral stairway of light ascended freely through the dark, and though I was unsure where it was taking me, or what I would find when I arrived, as long as the music was playing. As I climbed one step after another, I ran the soft part of my finger over every gleaming note, stringing them together in a necklace that l placed over my chest, or stretching them with both hands into a hoop of light that I could step inside and pass through, Over and over. I took a giant breath, my utterly transparent chest sparkling with light as if I’d swallowed a nebula from tens of thousands of light years away. My exhalation, sparkling WIth a mist of light, hovered before me, but if I scooped it up in my hands and took another deep breath, my arms and throat began to glow from the inside, down to my palms, and as gazed into them, I realized I was floating in space. I shut my eyes and held out my arms, shaking my body and head every which way, dancing and stirring up the light as I waltzed endlessly around my apartment.

Things that I was certain I hadn't noticed at the time, things that probably hadn't even happened, and things I never imagined Id remember sprang up and multiplied like wildflowers, growing silently and with incredible speed, filling my eyes and ears and heart.

“I’m really not,” Hijiri answered forcefully. “It has nothing to do with believing or not believing. It’s more like…  I don’t want to rely on anything, no matter what it is. Whatever answer's on that paper, I don't want it, unless I get there on my own, using my own head. I'l decide what I'm going to do with my own life.”

For a little while, I just stood there, gazing up at the night sky. The layers and layers of clouds, not exactly white or gray, hung in the night sky like the outline of some kind of creature, enormous and moving without a sound, a sight that made my heart race. The brilliant white moon showed its face.

The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining halt draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright. 

Why does the night have to be so beautful? As I wallk through the night, I remember what Mitsutsuka said to me. “Because at night, only half the world remains." 

Genesis (@whisperingchapters)

mitsukasa is the biggest red flag ever omg fawk that fictional man fr 😭

Fue bonito acompañar a Fuyuko en este viaje.

the fact that I loved this book when I first started reading it is what got it to four stars. I think that forcing myself to finish it despite being in a bitch of a slump made me numb to what I was actually reading. going to give it another try another time.

peyton mckenzie

dija

I sincerely don't see the point of this book.

Shona Tiger

Thank you to NetGalley and to Europa Editions for this eARC.

Fuyuko Irie is a proofreader. She does not get on with her co-workers, who find her quite weird, and exclude her as a result, even bullying her a little. She has no social life at all, and when she interacts with other people, she finds herself tongue-tied, and awkard.

Her life changes when someone with whom she once worked, Kyoko, offers her an opportunity to freelance. Because she hates her workplace, she realises she has nothing to lose, and in fact can spend all her time in her apartment, limiting social interactions. She meets Hijiri, who works for the new publisher, and who is to send her galleys for proofreading. Hijiri is an extrovert, with a vibrant social life—the opposite of Fuyuko.

At first things go fine for Fuyuko, although she finds her new life lonely, apart from her interactions with Hijiri, which become more frequent and more social, sometimes happening in bars. Fuyuko does not drink at these meetings, but, seeing Hijiri drink, and feeling that she wants to be more like her—more uninhibited—Fuyuko starts to drink at home, and then starts to carry alcohol around in her tote.

In another effort to expand her life, Fuyuko decides to go to college, where she meets Mitsutsuka, an older man who says he’s a physics teacher, and who attends courses at the same college. They embark on a friendship that Fuyuko comes to depend on, and meet regularly at a cafe.

This is the basic plot of Kawakami’s story, with a great in-depth study of Fuyuko, why she is the way she is, and then her journey back to herself. There are long passages that are almost in stream-of-consciousness style, which started to make my eyes glaze over in parts—particularly when Hijiri was speaking, which was a lot. There is also a plot twist that I did not really see coming, at the end, which I’m still not completely sure I’m happy about. However, Fuyuko’s story arc, the core of the novel, is a wonderful, redemptive one.

In all, this took me longer to read than it should have, and maybe that’s because the pacing is slowed down by monologues. This is also my first Kawakami, and I’m encouraged to seek out the author’s other books.

Rated: 7/10.

Trish

All the Lovers in the Night is a captivating and compelling read, completely bingeable and impossible to put down. You’ll read it in a sitting or two or three and then it’ll be over and for days after you’ll find yourself wondering about the physics of light and colors, reflections, relationships, what’s real, and what’s worth living for. 

In recognizable Japanese fashion, this is a quiet, contemplative novel with a signature Mieko Kawakami flair. It’s chock full of social commentary, observations and strong opinions on womanhood, motherhood, sex, depression, the trouble with fitting in and standing out, breaking social norms, and taking time to heal internal, invisible wounds - both faded and fresh. 

There are so many different kinds of women in modern society— each one thinking they’ve found the recipe for success and happiness, each one trying to bottle and sell the formula. It’s usually well-intentioned, but always so futile. What works for some, won’t work for others. What makes us happy now isn’t guaranteed to make us happy forever. Our jobs, relationships, hobbies are all subject to this inevitability. And that’s both depressing and exciting. 

I guess change — in the weather, our likes and dislikes, our interests and hobbies, our priorities, our relationships — is the one constant we can count on. It’s nice to know that just like the good times, the trying times in life won’t last forever. Like the tides, our lives ebb and flow, we just have to have the strength and resilience to ride it out, ideally with a friend or two by our side. 

Read/Add to TBR if you like:
* Japanese literature
* The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
* complex female friendships
* cafe romances and hot, sweaty summer days that pass by in a dreamlike haze 
* a sad, depressed, lonely AND alone female protagonist prone to day drinking and falling asleep in public
* woman in her thirties having an existential crisis 
* feminist rants

sanija

Stef

"Why does the night have to be so beautiful? As I walk through the night, I remember what Mitsutsuka said to me. “Because at night, only half the world remains.”


🌃All the lovers of the night bacaan yang cocok dibaca saat hari-hari hujan dengan secangkir kopi atau teh hangat sambil bergumul di dalam selimut dan tidak lupa mendengarkan Berceuse in D-Flat Major, Op. 57 nya Frederic Chopin. All the vibes this book give more like winter. Cold, Plain and Slow but yet still giving you lukewarm feeling.

heather

3.5 stars but rounded up to 4 for its lyrical language and use of really pretty metaphors.

 "now that the light was gone, i closed my eyes softly, knowing it would only be a short time until the light came back in the morning."

What a sad sad book. Beautifully written in a first person monologue but a big trigger warning should come with this (you know…the usual one). Can’t wait to read more recent material from Kawakami as the book was repackaged as a new release but it is actually from 2014.

Fraser Simons

This one snuck up on me. Fuyuko’s malaise is embodied in the text and it takes a while to understand what the verisimilitude is there for. Yet the entire time there’s good flow, so there’s a dream-like quality that occurs that really out me into a sort of zombie or mesmeric state as I progressed through what seemed like pretty airy prose. It’s pretty bold. I almost put it down a few times because Fuyuko is a really static protagonist and that’s really tough to engage with. There’s maybe four characters and Fuyuko interacts with, at maximum, one person at a time. It all feels a bit aimless. Until it isn’t.

The truth is i identified a lot with her. I’m a homebody too. I don’t have physical friends around. I lead a pretty quiet existence. And I like it that way, most of the time. So I kept reading. When and if the formatting clicks for you, it’s a pretty satisfying turn. Like feeling you’ve been dealt a crappy hand and then the River comes and you’re working with more than you thought. 

What emerges is a pretty complex, really quietly sweet novel about taking chances and the reality of pain as a requirement as far as needed context in a lived life. Because pain is supplied predominantly from others, not being hurt—not even realizing you are hurt—is a possibility that might be worse than the pain being avoided. People react to such things in a myriad of ways. Sometimes they shut down, for good reason, as a response. Other times it enlivens them and imbues them with humanity and dignity and transitions them into the complexity of a life responding to the lens of those around them; friend or foe, lover or friend. 

If you manage to grok what this is doing, pushing through the absolute mundanity (especially in dialogue) I think it really does navigate to a place where it does something quite interesting with the boredom or static malaise quality it simulates as a proxy for Fuyuko. It’s romantic in how it segues from powerlessness to a small kind of empowerment that takes hold, eventually blossoming.

Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &
All The Lovers In The Night by Mieko Kawakami

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Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &All The Lovers In The Night by Mieko Kawakami

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Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &
All The Lovers In The Night by Mieko Kawakami