Is loneliness experienced the same way anywhere in the world? Good night Tokyo and About my daughtertwo recently published novels, transport us respectively to Japan and South Korea, to meet atypical characters who evolve on the margins of society and live their isolation with discernment or apprehension, each in their own way.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
In Good night Tokyo, the first novel translated into French by the Japanese writer Yoshida Atsuhiro, solitary night owls and lonely night workers can always count on Matsui, a taxi driver who criss-crosses the deserted streets of the Japanese capital every night. He answers their calls or picks them up no matter where they are, when there is no longer a soul left to lend them a hand. Because Tokyo nights aren’t what they used to be, laments Matsui, whose taxi is running increasingly empty; the number of all-night stores has plummeted since the days of a booming economy have faded away.
But the taxi driver knows these nocturnal haunts which become for him, as for his customers, refuges in the heart of the night. There is this canteen run by four women who have buried their dream of having a big restaurant. Or even this junk dealer who only opens his shop at night, even if the clientele is becoming increasingly rare, and where Matsui brings one of his clients, a props man for a production house who must constantly unearth the most more heterogeneous at odd hours.
In this ethereal novel, we have the impression of floating in the nights of Tokyo to discover, against all odds, a city much smaller than we would have thought.
A strange place, too, according to Matsui, where the probability of making unusual encounters is much greater than one would think.
Loneliness and old age
For the narrator ofAbout my daughter, by the young South Korean novelist Hye-jin Kim, loneliness is quite different. This 60-year-old, who works as a caregiver for a woman with dementia and who has no family to watch over her, contemplates her own old age harshly as she watches her patient wither away.
Her apprehensions lead her to fear for her daughter; who will take care of her in her old age, when she has no desire to start a family? The question haunts the mother as the 30-year-old young woman, in debt and unable to find new accommodation despite her post at the university, actively campaigning against this precariousness, is forced to return to live under her roof – with her partner.
Reading this novel, we see that the relationship between mother and daughter – just like the way we perceive the elderly – has something immutably universal.
Through the poignant portrait of this mother who disapproves of her daughter’s choices and wants nothing more than to see her settle into an orderly life, we enter the intimacy of a woman weighed down by the weight of tradition, who can’t find the right words to avoid breaking the bond with her daughter, when she has no one else in the world. “I can’t tell him what my parents told me, which is to work hard, and always harder. I can’t throw that in his face. Times have changed,” she said in a dilemma.
We navigate here in the dark waters of the conflict of values between two generations at the antipodes, in an environment where the deadly fear of gossip is perhaps, in the end, the greatest incentive to conform to the established order. But from one thread to another, you end up understanding that the only thing that matters is finding that person who, at the end of the day, will make you feel less alone in the face of the ‘adversity.
Good night Tokyo
Yoshida Atsuhiro, translated from Japanese by Catherine Ancelot
Editions Picquier
240 pages
About my daughter
Hye-jin Kim, translated from Korean by Pierre Bisiou and Kyungran Choi
Gallimard
176 pages