Despite being full of lively characters, the most vibrant personality in Atsuhiro Yoshida’s Goodnight Tokyo might be the city itself. Tokyo here is a fascinating hybrid gleaned from the novel’s ten individual perspectives, and the introduction of each new set of eyes reveals, piece by piece, a city that is as multifaceted as it is massive.
Yoshida is a lifelong Tokyoite, and his attachment to the city helps to add a heartbeat to an otherwise inanimate metropolis of concrete and steel. This living and breathing maze plays host to a number of journeys and encounters, with Yotsukado, or “Crossroads,” the all-night diner that connects some of the stories in the novel, being a distillation of both this social intersection and the sense of unceasing urban motion at the centre of Goodnight Tokyo.
The story begins with Mitsuki, a “procurer” of props for movie sets, as she enlists the help of taxi driver Matsui on her late night search for loquats, a trip that ends in a bizarre encounter with a self-proclaimed loquat thief. From there, readers are escorted through the city by a roster of eccentric characters, including a magician-turned-detective who is the inspiration for a forthcoming movie; a funeral home worker who ceremonially disposes of unwanted telephones; and a call center employee with a missing brother who clambers up trees in the dead of night. While their specific motivations vary, what all these people share is a sense that something is missing from their lives, a feeling of deficiency that drives them to keep searching, sometimes without knowing exactly what it is they are hoping to find.
Goodnight Tokyo excels in capturing the romance of nocturnal life. Even though it is set over several nights, each story in the novel takes place between the hours of one and four in the morning. It’s easy to think of this period as a void time in which everyone sleeps, but Yoshida’s characters are those to whom these dead hours are daily life, and the author creates a late-night world that is so brimming with activity and character that it seems more than worth staying up for. This yearning for the night is emphasized by Haydn Trowell’s lyrical translation, such as is the case here when the setting of the sun feels more like a beginning than an end:
But morning eventually gives way to day, and day to night, the pale moonlight falling once more over Tokyo’s diners, its bars, its antiques shops, its film studios, and its telephone consultation rooms.
There is a nostalgia in the novel for a city that never sleeps, a fact reiterated by the author’s repeated references to the shrinking economy and its effect on a once thriving but now dwindling night-scene. The decades-long economic miracle that Japan enjoyed post-war led to the development of sprawling entertainment districts and streets bright with enticing neon, but the nocturnal city in Goodnight Tokyo is one that, like its real-life counterpart, is steadily losing its luster. And yet the characters persevere through those darkening streets, with the crossing of their paths underpinning the story. “In this city,” the narrator comments, “there were all sorts of reasons why people might bump into one another, countless paths and opportunities by which they might connect.” It is in these fateful encounters and connections that the characters in the novel prove most compelling.
In his afterword, Yoshida describes Goodnight Tokyo as “ten books in one”, and squeezing that amount of content into a work of less than two hundred pages does lead to shortcuts in storytelling. Sometimes, rather than rely on the organic development of characters through their interactions, the novel rushes to give backstories to those that haven’t yet had a chance to act in the present.
This occasional tendency, however, does not stand in the way of Goodnight Tokyo’s overall flow, and the novel is an always accessible and readable journey into a nighttime world often overlooked. It’s easy to ignore the inner-workings of a city, to miss all of the cogs that need to be kept turning night and day, but Yoshida describes these processes with a fluidity that will likely keep readers engaged until the very end. After all, whether it evokes a wanderlust or sends agoraphobia into overdrive, Tokyo is undoubtedly a city full of wonder, and Goodnight Tokyo is a little window through which to see it.