All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami (tr. Sam Bett & David Boyd)
Review by Jessie Jones
In 1967, when Nico sang “I’ll be your mirror”, she encapsulated a feminine double bind that continues to resonate cross-culturally in the contemporary milieu: ‘I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are/In case you don’t know’. That clarifying ‘in case’, that caveat, adds a sharpness to a womanhood otherwise cast as pure lack, pure vessel. Though people repeatedly ask the feminine to be a shallow, reflective surface—the water Narcissus stares into personified—those being reflected need the surface. Without this process, a mise-en-abyme of the self reflected in a feedback loop through another’s perspective, another’s opinion, you certainly ‘don’t know’ exactly ‘what you are’.
The protagonist in Mieko Kawakami’s latest novel, All the Lovers in the Night, acts simultaneously as both the vacuum and, by reflecting everything and everybody back on themselves, the contents that ultimately fills it. Fuyuko Irie is quiet, subdued, hardly in possession of a life that centres around the words, and ultimately actions, of other people. Her colleague Hijiri, a wincingly “girl boss” counterpart to Fuyuko, greedily fills the silences our narrator provides with self obsessive streams of consciousness. She drinks alcohol hungrily and heavily, in a way that Fuyuko cannot, without becoming intoxicated. She has a steady stream of lovers, an unattached and liberated attitude towards sex, is confused at several points about Fuyuko’s own asexuality. She wears lavish clothes which she ultimately foists upon Fuyuko, with barely a second thought to the wealth and glamour she’s discarding.
Hijiri represents desire throughout. Her feminism is overwhelmingly shrouded in neoliberal logic, concerned with taking, having, and mastering a business environment. For most of the novel she loves to be around Fuyuko because there appears, at least initially, to be no judgement where it exists elsewhere. Hijiri’s promiscuity, drinking, strength, and self-assuredness is alien and disconcerting to most. But Fuyuko betrays nothing of the sort, displaying the calm fascination of a child when she hears about her colleague’s escapades. Hearing how she actually feels, the judgements she’s filled with, is the sole privilege of the reader.
Initially, All the Lovers in the Night appears to stray from the shrewd philosophical engagement of Kawakami’s previous two novels, Breasts and Eggs (2020) and Heaven (2021). Breasts and Eggs has the space to manage a slow and restrained introduction of characters and concerns, woven around a taught, philosophical thread. The introduction of the characters, and the choices they make, structure the theoretical aboutness of the novel, and there’s always a beautiful, nuanced, intellectually rigorous aboutness with Kawakami. Both Breasts and Eggs and Heaven respectively, deal with a visceral everyday which is eventually interwoven with the metaphysical. There’s a lived reality, how it can possibly be theorised, and how this in turn influences how one lives one’s life.
This cyclical process seems slightly off in the first section of the novel: because Fuyuko works as a proofreader, perhaps? Certainly, I wasn’t expecting such an explicit gesture of metafictionality and, as with so many novels recently, I feared a potential laziness, falling back upon autofiction. But the reason Kawakami’s writing is so strong is that she performs something akin to what Gertrude Stein does with Tender Buttons. She zooms in, almost to the atomic level of these lived experiences, and abstracts them enough that they’re seen anew. There’s alchemy in the way this author deals with banality and it’s as abundant here as it is in her earlier work.
Rather than the novel being about proofreading, and about writing more broadly, any focus on this soon becomes secondary. Much like Natusuko’s novel writing in Breasts and Eggs runs parallel to motherhood, as another method of creation, proofreading here acts as a parallel method of reflection and interpretation.
On one level, we could read this as an indictment of alienated labour. She exists only to work, and work is the only thing that seems to give her life structure or meaning. Of course, this isn’t true and she realises, at the end of the novel, that she has never chosen anything in her entire life. Her first sexual experience is assault; her move from one permanent job to freelance is a heavy nudge from somebody else. When she finally goes on a date with Mitsutsuka, a nervous physics teacher she meets at the culture centre, it’s Hijiri’s designer cast-offs that she wears, in a restaurant Hijiri has visited, fashioning herself into an alternative self that is allowed, or capable, of choosing things.
This goes beyond critiquing work. Instead it, subtly, becomes a novel of hermeneutics. If, as the American philosopher John D. Caputo suggests, ‘an interpretation is a first-order act or process [...] hermeneutics is a second-order reflection upon such acts’, Fuyuko’s job represents this process. Her role, put simply, is to scan across people’s interpretations of the world for mistakes. If we zoom out, beyond Fuyuko’s task, to the novel as a whole, this layering of interpretations is revealed: Fuyuko’s life, and interpretation, exists within Kawakami’s, which then goes through editors, translators, and proofreaders, before it gets to the reader, performing their own interpretations. All of this comes back to how we decide how to be. We live by these interpretations and our sense of self is irrevocably shaped by them.
Kawakami, via Fuyuko, assesses the varying failures of people trying to decide exactly ‘what’ they are. The ‘in case you don’t know’, of Nico’s line, becomes ‘you certainly don’t’ in the hermeneutics of this novel. Looking at various attempts, however, what they eschew or include at the expense of alternatives, how they interact and bump against other people’s efforts, is the very fabric of being. Told you she got metaphysical.
All the Lovers in the Night is published by Picador, 12th May 2022