Read: All The Lovers In The Night

I’m continuing to prepare my mindset for Japan. I love Japanese literature. There is a softness to it, and an ability to dissect even the simplest of gestures into passionate, agonizing, emotional moments. Mieko Kawakami’s “All The Lovers In The Night,” is no exception. A “small” book of a “small” life but rife with drama that percolates below the surface until it explodes near the end. We’ve all heard the “quiet lives of desperation,” and this fits here. This book makes you reflect on your own life, and how much you might have missed.

The people we thought we knew and how even “small” lives broil with tension and moments that can forever change the world. Kawakami has won numerous awards in Japan, and this book makes me want to read the rest of her catalog. And who doesn’t love a book that is, at least in part, about publishing. Proof reading to be exact. How anyone does this job is beyond me, but yet there they are. The book does a great job of describing how the proof reader can’t read, or follow the story of the book they are editing. It’s about the words and letters, that’s it. And the lesson, mistakes still get through. Get it, read it.