Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

BookBrowse Reviews All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

All the Lovers in the Night

by Mieko Kawakami
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (8):
  • First Published:
  • May 3, 2022, 224 pages
  • Paperback:
  • May 2023, 224 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Reviews

BookBrowse:


Fuyuko Irie has recently quit her publishing job to become a full-time freelance proofreader, withdrawing more and more from society. She begins to spend time with her editor Hijiri, a charismatic extrovert, and assesses the limitations of her own life.

All the Lovers in the Night follows Fuyuko Irie, a woman in her mid-30s who doesn't have nearly as many lovers as the novel's cryptic title may suggest; instead, she has almost no one in her life. Having recently quit her job at a publishing house, Fuyuko has become a full-time freelance proofreader, working from home. She has no connection to her family, who live in a remote village in the countryside; she has no partner, no friends, and now, no colleagues, except for her editor Hijiri, who she speaks to only on the phone.

When Hijiri invites Fuyuko out for drinks one night, Fuyuko's carefully ordered world begins to crumble around her. She sees in the confident, charismatic, extroverted Hijiri everything she is not, and she starts to examine her own life more closely. In an effort to do something different for herself, she attempts to enroll in a course at her local community center, where she meets Mitsutsuka, an older high school physics teacher she strikes up an uneasy friendship with. The changes in Fuyuko's life are accompanied by heavy drinking—a habit she has picked up from Hijiri—and in attempting to reclaim control, she ironically begins to lose control of her actions, her work quality and her carefully structured existence.

Kawakami's book is a masterclass in depicting the insidious nature of loneliness, and in showing the ways in which passivity shapes a life every bit as much as action does. Fuyuko is shy, demure and agreeable. The first major decision she makes in this novel (and perhaps her life)—to quit her job—is hardly a decision at all. A former colleague suggests the possibility of becoming a full-time freelancer, and Fuyuko simply agrees.

Fuyuko walks through life as though blindfolded, but rather than presenting a straightforward fable where our unassuming protagonist comes to love her life through learning the value of asserting herself, Kawakami offers a thornier reality. The more Fuyuko tries to make the decisions one is theoretically supposed to make, the more these decisions chafe against her body and mind. She is often physically ill, she becomes unable to handle her workload, she fails to understand the motives that drive Hijiri, even as she begins to model her own life after her colleague's. The novel grapples with the complexity of societal pressures by showing a protagonist who lives an existence that society deems unusual, while also assimilating to her peers in every way she can.

There are no easy conclusions to be derived from Fuyuko's journey; Kawakami instead depicts a deceptively multifaceted individual with all the contradictory messiness of real life. All the Lovers in the Night, translated from the Japanese in sharp, engaging prose by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is a quiet, meditative novel that will appeal most to readers who enjoy a slow burn and a thoughtful character study. As for Kawakami's occasionally funny, occasionally devastating insights into the intricate nature of human relationships, they aren't to be missed.

Reviewed by Rachel Hullett

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2022, and has been updated for the June 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked All the Lovers in the Night, try these:

  • The Librarianist jacket

    The Librarianist

    by Patrick deWitt

    Published 2024

    About This book

    More by this author

    From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes the story of Bob Comet, a man who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself.

  • One Hour of Fervor jacket

    One Hour of Fervor

    by Muriel Barbery

    Published 2024

    About This book

    More by this author

    From the best-selling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog comes a family story with a difference, a novel about the decisions one makes and the destiny they determine by one of Europe's most brilliant and stylistically subtle authors.

We have 5 read-alikes for All the Lovers in the Night, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Mieko Kawakami
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: My Friends
    My Friends
    by Hisham Matar
    The title of Hisham Matar's My Friends takes on affectionate but mournful tones as its story unfolds...
  • Book Jacket: James
    James
    by Percival Everett
    The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023) and the Percival Everett novel it was based on, ...
  • Book Jacket
    But the Girl
    by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
    Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's But the Girl begins with the real-life disappearance of Malaysia Airlines ...
  • Book Jacket: Patriot
    Patriot
    by Alexei Navalny
    On the 17th of January, 2024, colleagues of Alexei Navalny posted a message to his Instagram account...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears, leaving a mystery unsolved for fifty years.
Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.