Towards the end of the first chapter of Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone (Other Press, 2025, translated by Jesse Kirkwood), the narrator tells us about an “old habit” of hers: She steals things. Not valuable things, just things. Pencils, cigarettes, mints. Sometimes, she wonders whether the people around her have noticed their possessions disappearing, and for the most part, they never do. They don’t know that she keeps them in her room, takes them out, and holds them to “recall… each item’s owner.” The narrator’s covert interest in the lives of others is more heartbreaking than any of the breakups or painful conversations Aoyama weaves through her novel.
Aoyama is the author of prize-winning short fiction as well as one previous full-length novel, Watashi no kareshi (2011). She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for A Perfect Day to Be Alone, the first work of hers to be translated into English. Translator Jesse Kirkwood, who works primarily with Japanese fiction, was the 2020 recipient of the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize.
A Perfect Day to Be Alone follows Chizu, a 20-year-old trying to make a living in her hometown by working a series of part-time jobs. When her single mother leaves Japan for a yearlong fellowship in China, Chizu moves to Tokyo. The novel’s beginning finds her arriving on the doorstep of Ginko, a distant relative in her seventies whose house shelters a rotation of striped cats and whichever of her friends’ daughters has recently decided to take on city life.
With a confident narrative voice and consistent tone, Aoyama’s Chizu lays out the events of a year alone, from her strikingly open and direct perspective. In addition to outlining her stealing habit, she guides the reader through her moments of self-reflection. She comments without shame that she is “spiteful,” “empty,” and “troubled.” Her confessions are not reserved for the reader, either: in one scene, she tells Ginko plainly that she knows herself to be “a nasty piece of work.” Aoyama has not written a typical coming-of-age novel in which our heroine journeys towards self-knowledge, because Chizu largely knows herself already. Instead, what Chizu struggles to understand is how she fits into the unavoidable network of other people in her world.
On one particularly sunny day in Tokyo, Chizu declares: “Everything was so dazzling it felt like it might give me a rash.” This remark is a perfectly concise representation of her reaction to beauty, stability, and happiness throughout the novel: Because she hasn’t found these things yet, she bristles at anyone who has. Ginko, newly in a healthy relationship, is one of these people. Chizu mocks her for wearing makeup and dressing up for dates. She drops hints that Ginko and her boyfriend will soon grow tired of each other, because––to Chizu’s frustration––this has happened to her with every man she has been with.
In my experience, young adulthood can often feel like a series of replacements. A new school to follow the old, a different summer job to replace last year’s, a new dorm room to follow the old one to follow the one before that. I’ve often commiserated with my friends about the seemingly endless cycle of packing your life into Bankers boxes, unpacking them, then packing them back up a few months later. I recognized this feeling in Chizu when, describing her new colleagues, she says that she “had replaced the people in [her] life with new ones.”
Chizu’s room in Ginko’s house is decorated with dozens of cat photos. Each is a cat Ginko once owned, but whose name she no longer remembers. Once a cat dies, they become an anonymous image on the wall. Staring at Chizu as she navigates her own relationships, the cat portraits pose a pointed question: Do we value our connections for the specific people with whom we make them, or simply for the feeling of connection itself? And how much significance can a single relationship have, if we gain and lose so many over the course of our lives?
Life’s forward movement hovers over the novel like a storm cloud that never quite breaks. Ginko’s house is directly across from a train station; Chizu hears the trains arrive as she falls asleep and spends a period of time working at a nearby station. When visitors leave the house, Chizu and Ginko wave to them from across the platform, literally watching people ride out of their lives.
Despite these symbols of change, much stays the same throughout the novel. Chizu gets used to the trains; their cycle of arrival and departure becomes a constant. She lives with Ginko for nearly all 150 pages of the book, notwithstanding the temporary nature of the situation. Both Chizu and Ginko inhabit stages of life defined by transition (early adulthood and old age, which is seen––at least by Chizu––as a series of days leading up to death), and yet neither ages much during the story. Even when Ginko gets sick, she recovers, seemingly to keep on living forever.
Aoyama divides her novel by the four seasons, writing one chapter for each. I initially struggled to understand this decision. The given season didn’t seem to make much difference to the plot, and the changes often felt abrupt. Chizu would describe an event that could take place at any time of year, then suddenly mention a change in the weather as a transition to the next chapter. Was there something I was missing? I soon wondered, though, if my confusion wasn’t part of the point. Naming each chapter after a season undoubtedly references movement and change.
I remember once trying to explain to a high school teacher of mine why the holidays didn’t always make me happy. It was December, winter break was fast approaching, and everything outside the classroom window was gently nudging us towards festivity. “The problem is that we do this every year,” I said. “Every year we put up the decorations, and every year we take them down again. It makes me feel like we’re living in a cycle we’ll never get out of.” Like trains coming into a station, seasons change year after year. They are signs of both transition and consistency.
Aoyama doesn’t deny the cycles of daily life; on the contrary, she highlights them. She reminds us, though, that there is meaning to be found even when the patterns start to feel identical. Chizu has never known anyone like Ginko, and the strength of this novel lies in the relationship between the two. They both speak as though the difference in their ages means they cannot relate to each other: Chizu assumes that Ginko feels only “vague, approximate emotions” at her age, while Ginko notes that her emotions are “not like young people[’s]” because “they don’t come in waves.” Nevertheless, the two characters connect over shared emotional experiences. They have both “raged against the world,” even if Ginko feels her days of doing so are over. When Ginko tells Chizu that life is not divided into an “out there” and “in here,” she may as well be saying that time does not split us into two separate selves, younger and older.
Even as we watch Chizu and Ginko form a bond, we know they will soon have to part. Ginko never references the young women who have stayed with her before, and her home bears no trace of them, unlike the cats memorialized in their portraits. Chizu imagines Ginko’s own portrait hanging on the wall after her death, but of course this will not happen––with the owner of the house gone, who would hang the picture? Similarly, Ginko confirms that Chizu will not have a place on the wall when she tells her that “those photos aren’t where I keep my memories.” Without images of each other, Chizu and Ginko will have to memorialize their relationship only in their personal histories of emotion. Perhaps Chizu has learned how to remember a person without the visual clue of an item she stole from them.
