“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.”
All the Lovers in the Night
‘I want to write about real people,’
Mieko Kawakami
“There are just as many memories as there are people, so there’s no correct version of one event. That’s why we need many different kinds of voices and experiences, and by reading those voices, we understand and construct a bigger picture of the world.”
Mieko Kawakami.
“Those Who Fight Most Energetically and Persistently for the New Are Those Who Suffer Most from the Old”
Leon Trotsky
All the Lovers In the Night is Mieko Kawakami’s third novel. The book covers similar ground to her previous books, " Breasts and Eggs and Heaven. All three books were translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd, with Breasts and Eggs having sold over 250,000 copies in thirty countries. Kawakami’s novels have come under sustained criticism from Japanese conservatives, Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s former governor and a former novelist, called them “unpleasant and intolerable”.
Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important writers to come out of Japan. Kawakami was born in Osaka in 1976. Her family were working class and poor. She was forced to work in a factory at the age of making heaters and electric fans. Later she had a job as a hostess and a singing career, finally becoming a blogger and a poet. She has almost single-handily dragged Japanese literature into the 21st century. She won many awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, in 2008. Haruki Murakami, one of the most important Japanese novelists, praised the writer, saying Kawakami is “always ceaselessly growing and evolving.” However, Kawakami has not always liked Murakami's portrayal of women.[1] In a 2017 interview with Murakami, she opposed his perceived sexism, saying, “I’m talking about the large number of female characters who exist solely to fulfil a sexual function” and “Women are no longer content to shut up,”
All the Lovers in the Night covers the life of a working-class Japanese girl, Fuyuko Irie, a proofreader in Tokyo. Fuyuko is a typical character used by Kawakami, a person who is single, childless, largely a loner and travels through life unnoticed and unloved.
As Fuyuko Irie says, “What I saw in the reflection was myself, in a cardigan and faded jeans, at the age of thirty-four. Just a miserable woman who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day like this, on her own in the city, desperately hugging a bag full to bursting with the kind of things that other people wave off or throw in the trash the first chance they get.”
There is cleverness in how “All the Lovers in the Night” addresses all the changes in the book's main protagonists. Kawakami never judges her characters and empathises with them/. As Joshua Krook writes, “If there is a core question in Kawakami’s work, it is what the oppressed should do to feel okay with themselves. Most of her stories feature people who are ignored or mistreated by society, with many having psychological problems stemming from their mistreatment. The protagonists cling onto one or two people as lifelines that keep them afloat in the storm.”[2]
Kawakami’s Treatment of Irie’s alcoholism is particularly sensitive. Alcoholism seems to be a major problem in Japanese society. Just typing in Google search engine for alcoholism amongst young Japanese women brings up many articles.
A recent study found that “young Japanese people drink much more alcohol than the global average. In 2020, 73 per cent of men aged 15 to 39 in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol compared to 39 per cent of their male peers globally. The difference was even starker for Japanese women: 62 per cent of women aged 15 to 39 years in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020 compared to just 13 per cent of young women globally.”[3]
Kawakami is not shy about discussing subjects barely mentioned in Japanese or, come to that matter, in Western Society, such as social class and gender. Her treatment of sexual violence towards women is one such issue. As Cameron Bassindale writes in his book review, “It reaches a nadir in tone when Kawakami produces a chapter detailing sexual violence which is so visceral and believable it will leave those weak of temperament wondering why they ever picked up this book. That is to say, Kawakami has truly outdone herself, surpassing even her lofty expectations of creating a narrative which is immediate and realistic; this English translation is a gift to anyone wishing to understand life for the modern Japanese woman and the perils and hardships many women face. Of course, no two human experiences are the same, and that point is apparent in the contrast between the female characters in the novel; however, the space between men and women in the book tells the state of gender relations in Japan. It is up to the reader to draw their conclusions.”[4]
Several middle-class reviewers like Mia Levitan have sought to position Kawakami as some “literary feminist icon”. Levitan writes, “ Anti-heroines aching for erasure may point to a broader unease. Kyle Chayka, the author of The Longing For Less (2020), posits that a modern desire for nothingness stems from overstimulation. Or it may be a reaction to “girl-boss” feminism. “Instead of forcing optimism and self-love down our throats . . . I think feminism should acknowledge that being a girl in this world is hard,” suggests Audrey Wollen, the Los Angeles-based artist who became known in 2014 for her “Sad Girl Theory”, which reframes sadness as a form of protest.”
A turn towards feminism cannot solve the problems women face in Kawakami's books or in real life. The plight of working-class women in Japan or anywhere else is inseparably linked to the plight of the working class.
As Kate Randall correctly points out, “The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle.As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”[5]
All the Lovers in the Night is well-written, eminently readable, and sometimes beautiful. Although largely written about womanhood, it is still a great novel, and one looks forward to Kawakami’s future work.
[1] A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself- https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/
[2] https://newintrigue.com/2021/06/18/the-writing-of-mieko-kawakami/
[3] Population-level risks of alcohol consumption by amount, geography, age, sex, and year: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2020- www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00847-9/fulltext
[4] bookmarks.reviews/reviewer/cameron-bassindale/
[5] The condition of working-class women on Internation
