Here’s the outside of a strange man that lived, loved, and was loved, beautifully and hauntingly told. I’m not much of a Sartrean, but reading The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino I couldn’t help but think of how he linked the existence of an Other to the formation of our essence: “If there is an Other”, he wrote in Being and Nothingness, “then I have an outside”. Kawakami (Record of a Night Too Brief, 2017, etc.) explores desire and the elusive nature of love through the voices of 10 women who all loved the same man. Do they really see each other? Can they truly do that? Everything in their lives is as mundane as it is weird. Her characters fall in and out of love in a whim and struggle to communicate when left alone with each other. Kawakami is a master of uncomfortable intimacy and desire. Just a magnetic presence, searching for love but never finding it (not at least in a permanent way), longing to remember and to be remembered.
Mr Nishino may remain an enigma but there’s no mystery to be solved here, no puzzle to put together. Throughout these chapters, presented out of chronological order, we get glimpses from Nishino’s story and personality but never in a complete manner, never coming together in a big reveal of a bigger picture. Our lives are not narratives and rarely offer us closure, and neither do Kawakami’s works. In a more traditional book, we could expect a closing chapter that shifts focalization to Nishino, finally offering us his point of view, but not here. Part of this is to do with a resistance to (easy) explanations, to clear meanings and statements.
It may be a cliché, but I always end up remembering them by what I feel is missing in their stories. I’ve always loved how Kawakami structures her books almost as collections of fragments, full of empty spaces and half-suggested events.
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