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Synopsis:

A symphony of interconnected lives that offers a compelling reflection on life in modern-day metropolises at the intersection of isolation and intimacy.

Set over several nights, between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., in and around Tokyo, this mind-blowingly constructed book is an elaborate, energetic fresco of human nocturnal existence in all its mystery, an enigmatic literary mix of Agatha Christie, Teju Cole, and Heironymous Bosch.

On this journey through the labyrinthine streets and hidden corners of one of the world’s most fascinating cities, everybody is searching for something, and maybe searching in the wrong places. Elements of the fantastical and the surreal abound, as they tend to do in the early pre-dawn hours of the morning, yet the settings, the human stories, and each character’s search are all as real as can be.

Goodnight Tokyo offers readers a unique and intimate take on Tokyo as seen through the eyes of a large cast of colorful characters. Their lives, as disparate and as far apart as they may seem, are in fact intricately interconnected and as their fates converge against the backdrop of the city’s neon-lit streets and quiet alleyways, Yoshida masterfully portrays in captivating, lyrical prose the complexities of human relationships, the mystery of human connection, and the universal quest for meaning.

Review:

Taking place between one and four-thirty in the morning, Goodnight Tokyo explores what it feels like to be awake and to work in the middle of the night in the most populated city in the world. Several characters interact, cross paths, and keep going on the straight axis of their lives. Others are doubling back to find something, a person or an object with which they had a random interaction and want to recapture a feeling. Many of the characters are working, but all of the characters are awake in the sleeping city, living a nocturnal life that is filled with the same feelings of loss, desire, and yearning for companionship as anyone living a regular, daytime existence.

In the short afterward, Atsuhiro Yoshida explains that Goodnight Tokyo is really a novel in short stories, the result of characters in ten different novels crossing paths in the middle of the night. This explanation sums up the way that Goodnight Tokyo is written and how it feels. There are many moments in the novel where characters meet in a serendipitous way, where Fate seems to be another character, pulling strings to make characters make decisions, walk down the wrong street, suddenly get hungry for a ham and egg breakfast set at a diner, or remember that they have a business card to an all night taxi service that will keep them within the orbit of the other characters. The nights in Tokyo are weird, but the weirdness in this novel seems to be drawn by Fate, and this turns Goodnight Tokyo is a very charming novel. 

I have worked night shift the last twelve years, and even on my days off, I am awake most nights between one and four-thirty in the morning. I am not always taking taxis or walking around the city, but there is definitely a distinct feeling of being up in the middle of the night that is captured in Goodnight Tokyo. That feeling of being awake while most everyone else is asleep, almost like you are being sneaky, simply because most everyone is not aware of anything you are doing. Walking through the sleeping city makes dark streets feel more dangerous than they are, and that genuine surprise of running into someone else working or living the same life as you is perfectly captured in this novel. What makes this work most as a novel is Atsuhiro Yoshida’s ability to capture the quiet atmosphere of a city where you are not only traveling through but you are surrounded by people who are sleeping. You want to make sure that you do not wake up anyone, and Goodnight Tokyo definitely feels like a novel about people living this life, trying to connect with one another while trying not to wake up their sleeping neighbors. I enjoyed Atsuhiro Yoshida’s storytelling and I hope that Goodnight Tokyo is the first in a series of translations of his work. 

I received an ARC of Goodnight Tokyo from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.