Book Nook - A Perfect Day to Be Alone: A Novel

 A PERFECT DAY TO BE ALONE: A Novel is a touching, at times cynical and subtly funny coming-of-age story, narrated by Chizu, a twenty year old stepping warily across the threshold of adulthood. While the setting is straight from a Hirokazu Koreeda film and its introspective, poetic style is often reminiscent of Françoise Sagan or Jhumpa Lahiri, Hitori Biyori is utterly distinctive. In this moving, microscopic examination of loneliness and heartbreak, Aoyama chronicles the painful process of breaking free from the moorings of youth.

When her mother emigrates to China for work, 20-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with its two resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains. For Chizu, this quirky house is a sort of necessary purgatory between childhood and adulthood, and its quiet dilapidation provides an appealing counterpoint to Chizu’s frequent bouts of anxiety, as well as a refuge from the world of relationships and work. The trains passing by outside are filled with passengers who seem to know exactly where they’re going; Chizu, on the other hand, is adrift in a fog of uncertainty.

Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establish an uneasy alliance, stress tested by Chizu’s flashes of youthful spite. As the four seasons pass, Chizu navigates a series of tedious part-time jobs and unsatisfying relationships, before eventually finding her feet and salvaging a fierce independence from her solitude.

The relationship that develops between Chizu and Ginko forms A PERFECT DAY TO BE ALONE’s captivating core. The novel‘s constant subversion of expectations is one of its chief pleasures. More than simple friendship, what forms between these two women is a knowledge of each other as comrades engaged in a lifelong struggle against loneliness and insecurity. The conversations between Chizu and Ginko, peppered with sarcastic asides and misunderstandings, are alternately delightful, hilarious and deeply moving – often all three at once. Here, readers are offered a microscopic examination of the everyday, sensory experience of loneliness and a moving depiction of female companionship, I hope to stay in touch with you about possibilities for it.

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About the Author: Nanae Aoyama born in 1983, is an acclaimed Japanese fiction writer. Her novel A Perfect Day to Be Alone received one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, the Akutagawa Prize. She has also won the Bungei Prize and the Kawabata Yasunari Literary Prize. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, German, French, and Italian.

About the Translator: Jesse Kirkwood is a freelance translator working primarily from Japanese and French into English. In 2020 he was awarded the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize for his translation of “Nocturne” by Yūshō Takiguchi. His new translation of Seichō Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2022.