The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami

“Once I’ve decided that I’m in love with all of someone – once I stop making value judgments about this thing being good or that being bad – it gets better. We feel their stresses as we also come to know – and yet not know – Nishino as well as they do, or don’t. It makes the stories and the women feel incredibly tangible and familiar. Each woman is showing the reader her own life whilst juggling their own fun and frustrations with Nishino. Even after ten chapters with him, seeing this man from ten perspectives, he is hard to pin down.Īnd therein lies the fun of the novel. Rather, there’s a man who has intruded on the lives of ten women, and we get to see how they live with him. There is no overarching narrative, really. Every girl or woman takes time to dissect this man, to understand his life, his actions, and his choices. For each woman he is a topic of intrigue at the least and obsession at most. Each story is self-contained, walking us through the life of an ordinary Japanese woman.Įvery one of these tales, in around twenty pages, tells one woman’s story of love, sex, and intimate discovery with a man named Yukihiko Nishino. It is very much a collection of short stories. It was unlikely.” A Novel of Short Love Storiesįirstly, I’m hesitant to even call this a novel at all. “Deep in my heart, I wondered whether a girl existed in the world who was kind and strong enough to love Nishino.

The Ten Loves of Nishino is a tough but fun book to unpack and explore, so let’s give it a try.

Each of their chapters is a story in its own right, with Nishino as the common thread. We get to peer behind the curtain of ten different lives ten different women from the age of thirteen to thirty and beyond. The book uses unique perspectives to evoke a broad empathy that demands a lot, emotionally, from the reader. The out-of-order biography of an enigmatic frustration of a man tortured and strange, told through the intimate first-person perspectives of ten of his women lovers throughout his life. The Ten Loves of Nishino (or The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino in the UK) is a novel that is, much like Kawakami’s other works, at once frolicking fun and darkly mournful.

The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami