Mieko Kawakami, All The Lovers In The Night

- Our lonely and isolated narrator, Fuyuko Irie, is a proofreader at a small publishing house in Tokyo. She gets persuaded to go freelance by Hijiri, a former colleague, a challenge she accepts. 

- However she has a major personality problem. She is a quiet thirty-five year old woman with no friends, who never goes out, and barely watches TV or reads the news. She’s profoundly ignorant about everything and has no interests. In other words, she's a total, stunted bore. Why on earth Hajiri likes her is a mystery, only to become clearer as the novel progresses. 

- As Fuyuko knows, proofreading is a lonely business, full of lonely people. Ironically, it requires a distance from reading. I never really liked reading. In the rare occasions she enters a bookshop she glances at the shelves and feels surrounded by possibility…All I knew for certain was that this place had nothing to do with me. One day she sees in the mirror the dictionary definition of a miserable person. Her depression intensifies. She starts mild drinking, but it becomes constant, from breakfast onwards, turning her into a drunk. 

- During one of her rare ventures outside her apartment she meets an older man who immediately knows she’s a drunk. Mitsutsuka is his name and he introduces himself as a high school physics teacher. They start regularly meeting for coffee. But she never gets to really know him although she becomes increasingly attached to him. She imagines them as lovers - lovers in the night. 

-Hijiri is her polar opposite. She's supremely articulate and confident about her philosophy of life: spirituality, natural living….God, divine providence, nature, some super-energy, the universe…completely self-serving. She has no need for all that mystical paraphernalia. She is beautiful and has many sexual episodes with different men. She's full of life.

- Sex is not a thing for Fuyuko. During her final year of school her ‘boyfriend’ Mizuno forced himself on her, effectively raping her. He shouted at her you can’t think or speak for yourself…it’s like there’s nothing in there. A positive statement of consent or otherwise seems impossible for her.

- She reflects eventually: What had I been doing up until now?…The job that I was doing, the place where I was living, the fact that I was all alone and had no one to talk to. Could these have been the result of some decision that I’d made?...I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I chose nothing. I did nothing…paralysed by loneliness at home.

- It's a mystery why Hijiri still keeps in touch with her, like a project. She sends her some lovely clothes to replace the cheap and shapeless stuff she wears, and she calls her frequently. She senses there's something deeper in Fuyuko that needs to be liberated. Her argument with her at the end is telling. She is right: The truth is too much for you to handle.

- The final chapter is set two years later. Hijiri is seven months pregnant, filled with joy and expectation, and Mitsutsuka, the older 'teacher', just a distant memory. However he writes to Fuyuko confessing he was never a teacher, just a retrenched factory worker. Their relationship was just a meaningless dance macabre. 

- There is so much going on in this propulsive novel, and its setting in Tokyo is just magical. If you're familiar with Tokyo at all you will relish the constant references to the upmarket precincts of Shinjuku, Shibuya and Harajuku. Tokyo becomes a character in the novel, a bustling, vital, human community. In stark contrast to our pathologically withdrawn heroine.