Each Sentence Is One You Can Feel
In <em>All the Lovers in the Night</em>, Mieko Kawakami draws on her poet’s sensibility to explore the awful intensity of human emotions.
Margaret Atwood came to fiction by way of poetry, as did Michael Ondaatje and Wole Soyinka. In their novels, as in those of the Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami, who wrote songs and poems before turning to fiction, the attention to sensory experience is particularly keen, concise, and meaningful. Kawakami doesn’t just assemble a tactile detail and park it in a scene. Sensation itself drives her scenes, the way the senses can steer a poem. In All the Lovers in the, when two work friends ascend to an apartment, their heels clang “out of sync on the steel stairs.” From this specificity, the sonic resonance of it, the reader knows that their visit will involve some kind of unacknowledged disharmony.
