All the Lovers in the Night

by Mieko Kawakami

That night, everything was thrown into oddly sharp relief, as if the pieces of the world before my eyes were telling me some kind of story. It was an entirely familiar scene, except the usual rows of houses, telephone poles and everything else seemed to shine with a triumphant light.

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?”

“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?”

“They’re all over the place. At school, at the salon, the park, the gynecologist. And at home, of course.”

“These women are literally everywhere,” Hijiri said after a brief pause. We heard a rush of laughter from the seats behind us. The clinking of glasses was followed by the sound of the door opening and a new group of customers coming in. “Well,” Hijiri chuckled. “They never say anything, but I know they all think there’s something seriously wrong with me.” This made her burst out laughing.

As a rule, I stayed away from any classes where the group gets up and moves around, or where you had to make something or share your work with everybody. The classes I flagged were all a bit more conventional, where you sat down and listened to someone lecture.

When we got to the station, we purchased our tickets and bowed repeatedly to one another. Once we had each done this for a fair amount of time, we naturally stopped,

I thought about the books that I had looked through in the bookstore. It occurred to me that they were full of things that people wanted to say to other people, or things people wanted somebody to say to them. Should you choose romance or work? Was it possible to have both? Should you choose to live your life alone, or should you choose to share your life with someone else? Should you have kids or not? What were the pros and cons? What did each choice force you to give up? What did you stand to gain? There are people who spend every day immersed in these considerations—like the younger women I saw standing by the shelves—following the trajectories detailed in these books, doing things to become happier, to become better versions of themselves. These women had so many choices, and so many temptations, so many layers of coincidences and incidents, and the choices they made would change the color of their lives. They were surrounded by possibility.

Over the course of three days, I gathered some observations into an email, which I polished to a diamantine sheen, then spent two more days reading over, until I had some drinks and clicked send with abandon. Mitsutsuka didn’t write back. I became incredibly depressed when I realized that there was no truth at all in the words “We regret the things we don’t do more than the things we do.”

With that in mind, I was so shaken when Mitsutsuka called me that I was unable to answer. As the phone continued to ring, I stamped my feet and spun around in circles,

I couldn’t bear him seeing me this way, with nothing to drink, a total mess.

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?

It occurred to me that maybe I was where I was today because I hadn’t chosen anything.

I was so scared of being hurt that I’d done nothing. I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I chose nothing. I did nothing.

“Ne Laissez Pas,”

Don't Let it go

“It’s French,” she told us with a grin. “It means ‘Don’t Leave.’”