All the Lovers in the Night

by Mieko Kawakami

that we can’t remember are actually the most important ones?”

“The shorter the wavelength, the more it scatters. Blue is really short, which is why the sky looks so vast and far away.”

We can only see light when it reflects off something.”

“When we see something, the reason we can see it is because it’s being hit with light.

“But color’s also got to do with wavelengths. The shorter ones look blue to us, and the longer ones look red. Out of all the light that comes down from the sun, the blue parts scatter the most. That’s why the blue spreads further and further away, until the sky looks enormous, like it does right now.”

green to us, simplifying things a bit, is because of how they’re absorbing all the different colors of light coming from the sun, except for green, which they reflect.

“the color that we’re seeing is whatever’s left behind.”

To keep looking for something you’ve decided is definitely there, when you can’t really say for sure?”

I can never figure out where mine end and other people’s begin.”

But sometimes I have to wonder if those thoughts or feelings might be coming from the things I read for work.

“When it comes to love, the only weapon that we’ve got is our emotions,

righteous indignation?”

She had other people she could sleep with or go out to eat with, but she had started thinking that maybe these things weren’t so important to her after all. She came back from vacation to find herself with a real mess on her hands: a difference of opinion between an author and a proofreader.

Gould hated Chopin,”

Mitsutsuka always sat in the same seat, wearing the same tired polo shirt and carrying the same shoulder bag.

Are you on Twitter? Everybody writes the most mindless, meaningless stuff on there.

‘Dead inside’ is a little too dramatic. I just feel hard and numb, like some part of me is losing all feeling.

At this point, I was no longer able to recall what Noriko used to look like, the Noriko I knew in high school. All that remained was a faint shred of her voice, frail like it was trembling in the wind, as we walked side by side, Noriko always to my right, in the empty hours that we spent together before and after school, dressed in identical school uniforms, but now that wispy voice was being eclipsed by the face of a grown woman who was prone to sighing and wearing brown lipstick, her fleshy chin resting on the back of her hand, everything slipping further into the distance with each blink, with every second.

My life is nowhere but here, and I am nowhere else.

Haven’t you always done your best with whatever you were up against? Haven’t you given it your all, whatever came your way?

How when I lost my bag, Mitsutsuka kept me company, even going with me to the police. I thought about the coffee. And the thousand yen I borrowed. About how we walked back to the station on that brilliant day, the way he turned by the stairs and came back. About the first time that he said my name. His voice, the way he said it. The faded patches of his worn-out dark blue polo shirt. The fraying corners of his shoulder bag. How

his shoulders and his back turned slightly inward. All about light. The things he’d taught me, going slow to make sure I understood. About the lullaby with a melody made of light. About the pens in his chest pocket. I could remember all the separate things that I had seen him do or heard him say, and yet I was unable to remember the substance of our conversations, or how we’d passed the time.

This was the first time in a long time I’d heard his voice, but Mitsutsuka sounded exactly the same. He spoke as if we had been talking at the cafe only yesterday, picking up right where we’d left off. Experiencing a strange emotion that I couldn’t understand, like sadness and relief mixed with bitterness and something close to anger, I felt my body being chipped away, getting smaller by the second.

“It’s soil soup,” the woman explained, hands folded at her stomach. “Soil?” Mitsutsuka asked. I took another look inside the bowl and asked if dirt was edible. “When properly prepared, it’s safe to eat. We boil it for several hours, which kills off any bacteria, then carefully skim off the impurities and pass it through a strainer,” she said. “Then we finish it off with gelatin.”

“Raw rice? Uncooked?”

Not getting caught up in other people’s lives, keeping everything to yourself, if you could have it your way.”

under the surface, you’re full of the same base desires as the rest of us, and it pisses me off to see you all wrapped up in this little story that you’ve put together just because the truth is too much for you to handle.