Nanae Aoyama's A Perfect Day to Be Alone, winner of Japan's Akutagawa Prize and translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood, is a slim coming-of-age novel of understated beauty.
A young Japanese woman named Chizu moves to Tokyo when her mother goes to China for work; Chizu is to live with a distant relative she's never met. "It was raining when I arrived at the house. The walls of my room were lined with cat photos." Chizu is 20; Ginko is 71. Over the course of a year, they move quietly around each other in a small apartment overlooking a commuter train platform. Chizu is periodically impatient, even cruel, toward the older woman, who placidly knits, embroiders, cooks, and, when solicited, imparts advice. Chizu is initially dismissive of Ginko, but notes that she "was turning out to be surprisingly normal," and that her friendship has something to offer.
Observations are made only very subtly, amid daily run-of-the-mill events, including the tiny dramas of Chizu's workplaces, her forays into dating, and shared meals at the apartment by the rail line. This restrained novel follows the four seasons of Chizu and Ginko's connection before Chizu moves on. Kirkwood translates Aoyama's writing with subdued loveliness: "I watched a boy taking a brown dog for a run, the two of them tracing a line across the grey concrete." A Perfect Day to Be Alone ends with less assured conclusiveness than its title implies, but in the spirit of the whole, it nods quietly toward positive change, or at least forward movement: "The train carried me onwards, to a station where someone was waiting." --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia