A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama

I purchased A Perfect Day to Be Alone on the strength of Doreen’s review. The book is, as Doreen described, short, quiet, absorbing, surprising and, in the end, memorable. A young Japanese woman named Chizu is the first-person narrator, and she tells her story over a bit more than a year as she manages her first forays into adult life, made all the more challenging by a move to Tokyo, the big city to end all big cities in Japan.

I’ll borrow Doreen’s summary of the setup, since it lays things out clearly and concisely: “Chizu has graduated from secondary school but doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life besides possessing a vague idea of living in Tokyo. Her mother, who is about to accept a post overseas, arranges for Chizu to live with Ginko, an elderly woman and distant relative who owns a house near a train station. Ginko has long been in the habit of letting a young woman stay with her in exchange for the company (and, presumably, the rent that Chizu’s mother insists on sending.)” I’ll add that Chizu had been living at home for a little while; she and her mother annoyed each other. Her father is barely present, many years after her parents’ divorce. As far as I could tell, the women who had stayed with Ginko through the years were all relatives of one sort or another on Chizu’s mother’s side. This is a glimpse of the kind of informal networks that make Japan (and many other places) run, and make it so hard for outsiders to find a firm footing.

Unlike many protagonists who move to the big city, Chizu neither has great ambition nor gets swept up in adventures. She and Ginko watch a lot of television. They take care of chores, more or less. They bicker a little bit — Chizu likes to aggravate people, for no particular reason that she can pinpoint — but only a little bit. Ginko is slightly eccentric; the room where Chizu stays features framed pictures of all the cats that Ginko has had through the years arranged around the perimeter where the walls meet the ceiling. She calls them Cherokees because that was the name of the first cat, and she says that’s the only one she remembers.

They get along well enough, and adapt their preferred routines to the other’s presence. Chizu goes through several nondescript jobs. Work is easy to find for a young woman in Tokyo. She’s a hostess for evening events for businessmen, serving up smiles to go with the drinks and the food. She works in a kiosk at the train station behind Ginko’s house. They’re not professions, and Chizu lets them both go when she gets bored enough. Days go by, seasons change, no great narrative sweeps up either of the women. Chizu is surprised that Ginko has gentleman callers, but is pleased when they occasionally invite her along to a dinner or an ice cream outing. She tells herself that she doesn’t really belong with them, but she does in her way. Aoyama gradually builds a picture of a life, somewhat at loose ends, but also developing ties, learning how to be a person without the structure of school or university or even close family. There are many millions of these stories in Tokyo, Aoyama implies, and they are each worth examining, worth living, worthy of chronicling in a novel.

When Chizu moves on at the end of the year, the two have an exchange that shows Chizu was neither as confident nor as aggravating as she pretended to be, and Ginko shows that she had known it all along, but that Chizu had to decide for herself to open up. The two had become closer without Chizu ever really realizing that she had what she had been looking for all year.

Two more things struck me particularly about A Perfect Day to Be Alone. First, and more banally, the Japan of this story is worlds apart from the Japan of the science fiction novels I grew up with. It’s a low-tech place, full of people who watch television and go to ballroom dancing lessons. Tokyo isn’t dazzling, it’s a bit noisy when the trains go by right behind the house but you get used to it. Chizu’s boyfriend for part of the novel squeezes people onto the trains, but mostly he looks good in his uniform and isn’t very talkative, like both Chizu and Ginko.

Second, this is a novel of absence. Chizu’s father is off-stage for essentially the entire book. She’s not self-aware enough to say that she misses him and that he has left a gap in her life, but she does and he has. Chizu’s mother sets the plot, such as it is, in motion by accepting a new job in China, knowing that Chizu is very unlikely to come along. Chizu and her mother butt heads almost every time they are together, but it seemed to me that both would rather have had a mutually enriching relationship even though neither knew how to create one with the other. Her boyfriends are not really any better; one seems to barely tolerate her (to be fair, this is mutual), and though the squeezer from the station actually likes her and becomes more a part of her life, he, too, seems more to be trying things out to see what they are all about. Which Chizu is also doing, as are a great many people at that stage of life. Chizu does not seem to have many friends, people she enjoys doing things with, people who like her for herself. She recognizes that she’s missing out on something, but she does not really know what. Only towards the end of the book does she start to make more connections, and that makes the ending as hopeful as it is wistful. The seasons turn again, and Chizu tries on a new life, maybe one that will be more solid for her. Aoyama leaves her young woman in a state of possibility.