For the Women’s Center’s Spring 2023 Feminist Book Club, we will be reading Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night. Originally published in Japanese, we will be reading an English translation.

The novel follows Fuyuko Irie, a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyuko stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it. As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. 

Conversation and analysis will develop between participants across each meeting, but some themes in the novel are alienation, trauma, sexual violence, intimacy, language, feminism, and freedom. As a content warning, there is a scene of sexual violence in the book.

Sessions – meet in Women’s Center:
FEB 28 | 12 – 1 p.m. (Interest session for passing out books and establishing ground rules)
MAR 21 | 12 – 1 p.m.
MAR 28 | 12 – 1 p.m.
APR 4 | 12 – 1 p.m.
APR 11 | 12 – 1 p.m.

In the News

Feminist Book Club uses literature to start conversations – The Technician