“Love at Least” by Yukiko Motoya

Despite the steady stream of works of all genres now being translated into English, it can still take a long time for even the work of award-winning authors to show up in the West. Twenty years ago, novelist and playwright Yukiko Motoya’s novella, Love at Least, was published in Japan and was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. It would be her first of four Akutagawa nominations. In . In 2015, she won the prize for the story “An Exotic Marriage”, published in English in the collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder, translated by Asa Yoneda. But there was still more to come for Love at Least, and in 2018 the story was adapted to film. This autumn, the English translation by Kamil Spychalski was finally published in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Although the book is under 100 pages and can be read in one setting, it’s a weighty tale with complex characters that rivals much longer stories and will appeal to fans of noir and psychological thrillers.

Yasuko is a twenty-five year old woman who spends more time in bed than at one of the several jobs she’s tried to keep since moving in with her boyfriend Tsunaki three years earlier. She’s part of an online forum of hypersomniacs and at first believes she’s the first to use this term:

I’ve only started posting on the forum fairly recently, drawn by the sense of camaraderie with others who have the same problems. I thought I was being pretty clever in calling oversleeping hypersomnia, as opposed to insomnia, and was surprised to find everyone else using the word as though it was common knowledge.

Her oversleeping stems from her depression, which she traces back to her mother. She can’t find much joy in her life and had dropped out of design school before she met Tsunaki at a mixer. She found him dull from the get-go, even though he was editor of a notorious tabloid. The two live together as soon as they start dating and as much as she tries to take care of domestic jobs like cooking and cleaning, she ends up sleeping most of the day. Tsunaki doesn’t complain and asks very little of her.

About halfway into the story, Tsunaki’s ex-girlfriend Ando seeks out Yasuko to inform her that she and Tsunaki never had closure. Ando wants to make sure she made the right decision in breaking up with him. She also accuses Yasuko of wasting Tsunaki’s time and using him for his flat and his money. This confrontation just sends Yasuko into a deeper depression:

It has been a while since I last found myself in the firing line of such malice, and mentally I am completely shattered. The wound I had been slowly nursing by shutting myself away has been mercilessly gouged open by the heel of that boot.

Ando’s harassment turns into stalking and seems even more severe than Yasuko’s depression. When Ando all but forces Yasuko to go out to dinner with her, only to berate her for sleeping all day, she ends up asking the restaurant if they would hire Yasuko.

The family restaurant is staffed by a colourful cast of characters, and Yasuko ends up finding sympathetic colleagues. And just as Yasuko seems to be able to finally keep a job, she is consumed by the question of why Tsunaki stays with her and what she’s really getting out of their relationship. The story culminates with Yasuko coming to terms with these questions.

As much as Yusuko’s depression rests at the center of the story, she also can be quite humorous. Her sharp and often dry sense of humor appears from the very start of the book, well before she meets and starts dating Tsunaki:

A month ago, one of the guys at my part-time supermarket job casually asked me out on a date. The idea that even such a no-hoper figured he was in with a chance plunged me into a depression.

It’s not difficult to imagine Motoya’s characters and the scenes in this story on the big screen, so it’s no wonder the novella was adapted to film in Japan. And now English readers can read Kamil Spychalski’s translation.