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. The two women establish a thin bond, and then Chizu moves on. This restrained novel follows the four seasons of their connection.
Chizu is a solitary person, without friendships or much success in relationships, nor is she close to her mother, whose emigration doesn't affect her much. When she arrives at Ginko's home, she reflects: "I hadn't bothered introducing myself properly.... I wasn't in the habit of going around declaring my name to people like that. Nor was I used to others actually calling me by it." Her life has been passive: "I'd been told to come, so here I was." She does not want to go to school and instead takes on a series of part-time jobs. She is curious about falling in love, especially when Ginko's male companion becomes a regular visitor; she is often invited along on their outings. In this and other ways, Ginko proves the more generous member of their household. 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.
These 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. Kirkwood translates Aoyama's writing with subdued loveliness: "The train was approaching the bridge over the Yanase River. Its banks were lined with slender cherry trees, their branches still bare.... A watch on my wrist, pumps on my feet, a black handbag at my side. 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
Shelf Talker: This award-winning novel in its first English translation follows a young woman rooming with a distant septuagenarian relative for a year, and the muted dramas of her coming-of-age.