As Comet Hyakutake passes Earth in March 1996, four friends experience an array of puzzling events: the dead reappear and the living disappear. Daryl Qilin Yam’s Lovelier, Lonelier begins in Kyoto, where the paths of Isaac Neo, Tori Yamamoto, Jing Aw and Mateo Calvo Morales first intersect, and where the trajectory of their lives change after one weekend together. Divided into three parts to weave through different perspectives, years and cities including Kyoto, Madrid and Singapore, Yam presents a story of once-in-a-lifetime encounters, not just with the brightest and closest comet to approach Earth in 200 years, but also with people.
Isaac, a runaway from Singapore, finds Tori, a Japanese girl working at a ryokan, in front of Kyoto Station at 5:51 in the morning, barefooted with no trousers on, due to what she explains was a “bad dream”, one where the ground starts to move as she heads to the station. The dream gets tangled up with reality, as the narrator explains “she was crouched over her suitcase in the dream, even though, in reality, she remembered holding on to it.” Yam plays with this line between illusion and facts throughout the novel. Real-world events are integrated to ground the story in real life, yet their existence is made bizarre. The Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, the Great Comet of 1996 and the Nicoll Highway collapse in Singapore in 2004 have some invisible connections to each other, and influential Japanese figures such as artist Teiji Furuhashi, who passed due to an AIDS-related illness, and singer Kyu Sakamoto, who was a victim of the crash of Japan Air Lines Flight 123, come back to life.
Tori, together with Jing and Mateo, friends of hers from Singapore and Spain, meet Teiji Furuhashi under the iridescent green comet in 1996, five months after Furuhashi’s passing. In an attempt to make sense of this, Mateo states
I had no idea he had passed away. Sometimes, though, I, I wonder–I wonder if it’s possible to want something so much it appears before your eyes.
The distinction between imagination and actuality becomes increasingly tenuous, as Mateo and Jing realize that the taxi driver who drove Tori away, leading to her disappearance, was none other than Kyu Sakamoto, who passed away over a decade earlier. This leads them to hold each other’s hands, to verify their presence by confirming:
You feel this?
Yes.
I’m real.
Okay.
This is real.
The ever-present teetering between fiction and truth escalates further with the careers and marriage of Jing and Isaac, the only two out of the group of four who do not mysteriously go missing. Isaac becomes a renowned actor in Singapore, winning several awards and constantly being cast in a new project, and Jing becomes the author of a science-fiction novel, The Horvallan, published not necessarily to great acclaim but to surprisingly good sales. Their lives, already on the borderline of reality, are built on fabrications as their professions require them to deceive, evident as Jing explains that Isaac on the silver screen is “not really my husband”, but “a version of him”.
Yam includes Jing’s The Horvallan in the second part of the novel, almost as a book within a book. Written in first person from Jing’s perspective, her book introduces some more ambiguities, especially as to who the “you” she addresses may be. Aside from the sections that relay her story of the Horvallan—an immortal character who exists across millennia—Yam uses an omniscient narrator, one that is sparing with the details that are revealed. Quotation marks never accompany the spoken dialogue, making what is said by the narrator and the characters indistinct at times. These genre-defying stylistic choices escalate the feeling of not knowing what or whom to believe.
Some answers are provided by the end of the novel, such as the identity of the “you” that Jing addresses, but the story is nonetheless left open-ended, concluding as a taxi approaches Isaac, possibly tempting him to hop on for a ride to an undisclosed destination. The abundance of unusual occurrences, including Isaac’s conversations with a talking macaque, Tori’s encounter with a monorail operator who is a giant fish, and the disappearance of Tori, Jing’s mother and Mateo, are left mostly unexplained—only small hints as to what may have occurred, or what may be occurring, are given. Lovelier, Lonelier is a reflection on inexplicable yet meaningful connections and disconnections, of how people or things can mysteriously come together, then even more enigmatically and unexpectedly drift apart.