Mieko Kawakami has a style–a lonely, working woman struggles to stay afloat amid financial pressures and expectations about appearance/behavior/marriage/etc. Most of the books (“Heaven” is the outlier) have a consuming (but unreliable?) narrator. There’s an honesty about poverty and expectations in modern(ish) Japan like Tsushima but otherwise Kawakami nearly stands on her own. Maybe too much? It could be that there is a cultural barrier here but many of the topics and conversations felt a bit expected. Maybe this is a western lens applied to a work that is trying to make a point about the tenuous nature of the hospitality industry and how much appearance and tolerance of harassment are necessary to secure a small income. Maybe this point was already made in “Breasts and Eggs.” Our protagonist is lonely and motivated by the determination to work hard to the point of exhaustion due to a tenuous employment while neglecting any sort of leisure or social life, similar to “All the Lovers in the Night.”
This novel follows Hana, basically a runaway who takes a job at a bar and moves in with one of her mother’s strange friend, Kimiko, who had helped her when she was younger. She finds some friends who join her. When that’s no longer viable, she turns to petty crime and some Yakuza-associated schemes to get by. Things fall apart as always and a regular job is necessary which takes us to 2020.
Kawakami writes with style and control, this feels like her most mature novel but, having read the others, I wonder if she’s searching for more to say.
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