The interconnected night time lives of different in habitants of Tokyo are explored in this slim book, with each chapter starting at 1AM. Mitsuki works at a movie prop warehouse and has to source loquat fruits in the middle of the night. Kanako works at a 24 hour advice call centre and has a brother who went missing years ago. Cab driver Matsui also wishes to find someone he knew long ago. Shuro goes to a late night movie in Matsui’s cab, and talks about being an actor, or is he a detective? There are other characters too, whose lives and problems we see and whose loose threads tie them all together.

This is quite a thin one, only 174 pages, so I’m cautious of saying too much about the different characters because it would also reveal plot points, but loosely speaking, the chapters are all short stories about the lives of people who live in Tokyo and are active at 1am, but as you read, the pieces off all the lives fit together like puzzle pieces, and the different characters lives interact and interconnect. The stories are mostly about small, personal things, with the end of the chapter flowing into the plot opening of the next. At first, the overall picture being painted is soft, a little vague, and then the pieces come into focus and then fit into the larger story or world being created. I thought that aspect of this book was pretty cool.

The author is Atsuhiro Yoshida, who was born in 1962 and is already a bestselling author in Japan, with over 40 books to his name. Having been published in several languages already, this is his first book translated into English. I’m very curious about his other books and hope that more will be available in English soon.

While there is an ensemble cast, perhaps the main character is Tokyo itself. In a way, the book shows an amalgam of angles on the city, but perhaps it is also a love letter to the city too. For it’s residents, in their own words, sometimes the city is boring, often a very lonely place at night, quieter since an economic downturn. In the story, the old is respectfully replaced with the new, especially old technology and means of communicating. Something about the call centre advice line that Kanako works at felt very Japanese to me, though I can’t put my finger on why. While advice lines are universal, the loneliness and isolation of some of the callers and it’s professional set up felt unique. Imagery like canned coffee on night shift breaks, convenience store meals, strangers in the night who might be trouble, the Shinjuku area being called the “sleepless fortress”, but more sleepy now than in the past. And the ideas that city people are more cynical about life and it’s possibilities, they have given up on hope and dreams. Though Tokyo is a big city, it’s not one central location, according to this book, meaning that there are areas that people don’t leave that much, making chance encounters and people being linked to each other very high. There’s a sense of fate that this book is threaded through with, as though Tokyo brings people together, creates its own fateful coincidences. I really loved soaking all of this up in this book and spending time in it, though as someone who has never been to Japan, I’m sure a lot of the more subtle things were lost on me. It’s like the city itself is seen reflected in glass, and you find it by the way that everyone else lives their lives in it and is shaped by it.

This is a lovely small book, with it’s vignettes of people’s lives that reflect their larger inner lives and concerns, all at 1am, with the kind of pondering that that late hour tends to bring out in us. That late hour makes the whole sometimes a little dreamlike, and a lot of the problems, while impactful issues, do not have major stakes or major emotional damage involved. There’s a sense of the city taking a hand and putting people’s solutions coincidentally to hand. I found this to make it a more gentle and relaxing kind of read. Everything felt quaint and mostly very safe, cozy and benign. That’s not to say that the book doesn’t have stakes or that real world things don’t happen here, but that after the level of drama and emotion and world events we’re constantly bombarded with, or even the strong messaging, immediacy and trauma of the current Western or North American novel, at least that I am seeing, this felt so … normal!

Read It If: you like the ham and egg set at your Japanese corner diner. This is a wonderful literary fiction book about intersections of places, people and lives. This one is highly recommended.

Thank you to PGC Books for the copy of this book for review.