Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2022, 224 pages
Paperback:
May 2023, 224 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Rachel Hullett
Buy This Book
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 Fuyuko 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.
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. 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...continued
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(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett).
Loneliness is one of many themes deftly explored by Mieko Kawakami in her novel All the Lovers in the Night, which follows a freelance proofreader living in Tokyo who has withdrawn from society.
A 2022 study conducted by the American Psychological Association concluded that global rates of loneliness have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Japan, this increase has added to an existing phenomenon: The country has long been known for its high rates of loneliness. There are at least half a million people in Japan who live as "hikikomori," a term coined by psychologist Tamaki Saitō in 1998. Hikikomori are essentially people who live in complete physical and social isolation, and they officially comprise 1.57% of the ...
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