All the Lovers in the Night

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance proofreader in Tokyo, thirty-four and almost entirely alone. She works from home, speaks to few people, and has begun to drink to get through her days and quiet the sense that her life is happening at a distance from her. Once a year, on her birthday, she walks out into the city to look at the winter lights, one small ritual of beauty in an otherwise closed-off existence.

Slowly, tentatively, she begins to reach outward: a prickly working relationship with a confident female editor, and a gentle friendship with Mitsutsuka, a soft-spoken older man she meets at a culture center, whose conversations about light and physics become the center of her narrow world. As she edges toward connection, Fuyuko must confront her loneliness, her drinking, and a painful memory she has never faced.

Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, writes with quiet precision about isolation and womanhood in contemporary Japan. All the Lovers in the Night is a spare, luminous novel about the terror and possibility of letting another person in.