All the Lovers in the Night

by Mieko Kawakami

“It’s crazy, right? Who has this much to say to people?”

I was positively baffled by the idea that enough experts were out there in the world for them to offer classes in this many areas of expertise, or culture, or education, or whatever you might call it, and on top of that enough interested people, at least ten or twenty times the number of instructors, to make the courses viable, and for a while I lay motionless, sprawled out on the kitchen floor. When I imagined classes like this being held, day in and day out, inside a building somewhere in Shinjuku, it was almost too much for me to take, and a sigh came rolling out of me.

As I passed below the haloes of the green and red traffic signals, I was taken by this strange view of the evening, the city streets full of people—people waiting, the people they were waiting for, people out to eat together, people going somewhere together, people heading home together. I allowed my thoughts to settle on the brightness filling their hearts and lungs, squinting as I walked along and counted all the players of this game that I would never play.