All the Lovers in the Night

by Mieko Kawakami

Why does the night have to be so beautiful?

“Because at night, only half the world remains.”

It isn’t anything, but it’s so beautiful that I could cry.

Aren’t you going to get married? Why not? What do you do on your days off? I said that I stayed home. They laughed,

practically snorting. What’ll you do with all the money that you’re saving?

You can make people believe whatever you want. You can fool them like it’s nothing. But you can’t fool yourself, not really.

That’s why what matters is how you think about your work in your own lifetime, how much you respect it, how hard you’re trying. Or tried.

there has never been a perfect book, and that no job can ever actually be finished.

“Even though all of our experience tells us that there’s no such thing as a book with zero mistakes, we still aim for that perfect book, don’t we? A perfect book with no errors at all.

Everybody in this life has something they have to put up with. An uneasiness laced with regret climbed its way up my throat, nothing that a voice or sigh could shake.

Every birthday since, I’ve gone out for a walk at night.

proofreading is a lonely business, full of lonely people.”

“Some writers are great, but not successful. Then you get other writers who are successful, but not so great. I’m sure there’s some sort of special principle behind it. Then again, I guess there are things like that everywhere. We get this all the time as women, right? Like, if you make plenty of money but don’t have any kids,

you might get called successful. But unless you have kids, no one will ever call you a great woman. You know what I mean?”

“Well, in one way, the question of greatness definitely matters, if we’re thinking about where our salaries are coming from, but as far as our work is concerned, it makes no difference. Because all manuscripts are equally fair in the eyes of the proofreader,”

I only say something when they’re like, you should get in on this, looking all smug. I mean, when someone says something stupid, don’t you want to tell them how stupid they sound?

the universe will tell you when the time is right.

I’m not the kind of person who likes giving up control.”

“It’s not like I want people to hate me. I’m just not about to go out of my way to make them like me, either. Being liked is wonderful and all, but that’s not what life is about, you know?”

“People act like feminism is a dirty word.

As if being a strong, hard-working woman has fallen out of fashion.

I’m not strong. I’m honest.

All they want is power and recognition.

Hijiri spread the water droplets on the counter with her finger. In the bulging surfaces of the drops, the mood lighting turned to gold and shimmered.

“They never say anything, but I know they all think there’s something seriously wrong with me.”

My name is Fuyuko Irie, a freelance proofreader, thirty-four years old.

like to go out on a walk once a year on my birthday, Christmas Eve, in the middle of the night.

What I saw in the reflection was myself, in a cardigan and faded jeans, at age 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.

was feeling slipped away without actually disappearing from my mind, and I loosened up, as if a pane of glass had been placed between me and my experience, blurring things.

The most I had been able to decide was that I wanted to study something completely new to me, something I knew nothing about.

I picked out a few options that would fit my schedule and budget.

A woman wearing glasses with thin silver frames eyed the ticket machine just behind me.

his fifties.

“The pens. You could get hurt. If you fell. Your throat.”

proofreading isn’t anything like reading . . . It’s completely different,”

“The first thing they teach you as a proofreader is that you’re not supposed to read the story on the page. That goes for a novel or any other kind of book. No reading allowed.” “You’re not supposed to read?” “Right. As a proofreader, no matter what you’re working on, you’re not allowed to get lost in the text.”

we have to engage with every aspect of the story. Plot, continuity, chronology, everything. Anyway, the idea is to keep our emotions out of it . . . to focus our energy on finding all the errors hiding in the book.”

you’re sitting at your desk, not moving all day long, looking for mistakes, so if you’re the kind of person who wants to get up and move around, it might be a lot.”

“In a way,” I said, “maybe it was a good fit for me. As soon as I finish a book, I forget the story and whatever facts were in it. I forget it, all of it. Sometimes all I can remember is the title. After a couple of years, it’s pretty much gone. When I read, it’s like I’m not actually reading, and when I’m done reading, I never feel like I can say I’ve actually read the thing. It’s always the same. By the time I start on the next manuscript, my mind’s blank and I can start fresh, looking for mistakes. That’s why no matter how long I do this, I’ll never be a walking encyclopedia. Nothing sticks.”

Anything that involved experiments or formulas was hard for me.

“It’s about light. I don’t know how much this has to do with physics, but I love looking at, um, light . . .”

“Light’s a mystery. No one knows what it is. Sometimes I think I’ve got it figured out, but I really don’t. When I was a kid, I thought it was the strangest thing. I was so curious that I started studying it.”

I still think about light sometimes, even now.”

“We’re talking about the same light.”

When I found an error, it was my responsibility to correct it for the next printing. This meant I had to let whoever was in charge of the title know.

“I know there’s no such thing as a perfect book, but nothing breaks a proofreader’s heart like a mistake you find after the book comes out.”

letting the words come out before I thought them over.

the longer we live, the more it feels like time speeds up?”

“I guess I spent a lot of time sleeping. I really spent a lot of time asleep, probably half the day, like it was nothing. When I woke up, my head would hurt from oversleeping. So I’d just go back to sleep.”