A Perfect Day to Be Alone – Nanae Aoyama

[Other Press; 2025]

Tr. from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood

In The Politics of Experience, his influential critique of alienation, R.D. Laing writes that we must “begin by admitting and even accepting our violence rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it and therewith we have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.” Alienation is a fundamental split between people and also within ourselves, in which our individual self vanishes under the demands of our particular society. Managing the pain of this split can mean directing violence inward, at ourselves, or outward, at those closest to us. In her novel A Perfect Day to Be Alone, Nanae Aoyama examines this simultaneous destruction, our fear of living (self) and loving (other). The novel points away from individual failures toward the failure of our social worlds, their failure to provide either life or love.

Twenty-year-old Chizu has to figure out how to make a living after her mother leaves her for a job in China. Living with a relative named Ginko in Tokyo, Chizu faces the variously petty and difficult alienations of daily life in Japan. She falls in and out of love with unsuitable, emotionally unavailable men. She works a mind-numbing job. She struggles mightily with her own interiority. The novel unfolds in seasonal chapters over the course of a year. The time frame of a year, in addition to marking the passing of time, references a material constraint: Chizu needs to save 1,000,000 yen to get a place of her own. Over the course of this year, we get a sense of Chizu’s typical day and typical self, what does and does not change.

Nanae Aoyama’s work has won several major Japanese literary major awards, including the Akutagawa Prize. While Aoyama has long bibliography of novels and stories, A Perfect Day to Be Alone is her English debut. Jesse Kirkwood is a prolific Japanese to English translator who has translated novels such as The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki and the murder mystery by The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yashuiko Nizhizawa. A Perfect Day to Be Alone is a work of literary fiction, slim and compact like Kirkwood’s other translated works. Kirkwood’s translation beautifully juxtaposes the simplicity of language that is sometimes at odds with Chizu’s intensity of feeling. Kirkwood’s prose is deceptively transparent, inviting a closer consideration to draw out the social and historical implications of Chizu’s experience.

The novel belongs to a canon of Japanese women authors interrogating the alienation of class and labor, encompassing disappointing relationships and the alienating nature of both waged and domestic work. A Perfect Day to Be Alone recalls Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo and Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void, though A Perfect Day was published before any of them. The translation I now hold in my American hands was published in English in 2025, but was originally published in Japanese in 2007. The novel feels even more relevant today, and not just in a Japanese context, especially as discontent with work has given rise to quiet quitting, lying flat and other worker refusals around the world.

Sometimes abject, sometimes swaggering, Chizu is perpetually seeking an appropriate object for her misery. Sometimes, she seems to be genuinely seeking connection. This tension is evident in her habit of thievery. Since she was a child, Chizu tells us, she has taken belongings from those around her. It is a kind of revenge but also an attempt to be closer to people. Chizu never steals objects of value but “only objects devoid of any value or importance—a motley assortment of erasers, pencils, paper clips and so on. To me it was like taking a commemorative photo.” She eases her guilt this way: “I would tell myself I wasn’t stealing, I was collecting.” But lying to herself only goes so far. When she looks at the items to remember their owners, it provokes self-hatred: “I’d start hurling insults at myself in an eruption of self-loathing: Thief! Coward! Freak! When I did so, I could almost feel my skin thickening in real time. I wanted to become immune to even the harshest insults.” It is a painful scene to read. We learn a lot about the social world she is training herself for.

Another painful scene raises questions about Aoyama’s perspective on Chizu’s character. Ginko’s boyfriend, the older gentleman Hosuke, takes both Chizu and Ginko out to dinner. Chizu drinks numerous glasses of wine and decides to eat as much as she can on Hosuke’s dime. Her rebellion comes with a price: “In the middle of the night, I started feeling unwell, and before long I was regurgitating everything I’d eaten earlier. As if spurred on by the fierce winds outside, I started making over-the-top retching sounds. Soon they developed into a weird rhythm. Tears and snot ran down my face, mixing with the vomit.” Chizu’s abjection here is both stunning and strangely performative. Tears, snot, and vomit are all the body in excess of itself, an inability to hold oneself together. Chizu’s excess at dinner, in which she has taken advantage of Hosuke, literally turns into waste placed before the reader, repelling us. But she also seems to repel herself, turning her illness into a performance of her own punishment by being “over-the-top.”

My concern is whether Aoyama’s perspective on Chizu is a conservative one or one that is attempting to excavate something important about the subjectivity of a social type called a “freeter” in Japan. The term comes from the Japanese pronunciation of a portmanteau of free-arbeiter, フリータor furītā in Roomaji. The point is not that Aoyama should have unrealistically represented Chizu as a wonderful person who would rise about her social circumstances (which would be an annoying American idiom). The question is how to interpret Chizu’s abjection: is there an easy connection between the bodily disgust evoked in scenes like the one above to Chizu’s position on the margins of society? If so, is it a judgment on Aoyama’s part or an attempt to reveal something about the reader’s own biases?

I ask these questions because freeters, young people who work part-time, float socially, and have little permanence, are often faced with discriminatory attitudes about their laziness and social uselessness. Not all freeters are part-time workers by choice, but many do mark their part-time as a refusal of traditional Japanese attitudes to work. In other words, freeterism is both an imposed condition and a reaction to inequality. According to Yuki Honda, when the Japanese economic bubble started to implode in the 1980s, major transformations in industry, social structure, and company hiring practices created a very different labor market. Stable employment with benefits started to vanish, replaced with part-time, non-benefited work, often with poorer conditions, pay, and status. Freeterism is a highly gendered phenomenon, as well, following typical divisions of labor and wage gaps in which women earn less than men and are pushed into lower-paying fields such as customer service.

Some features of the freeter existence are unique to Japan, such as the dreams shaped around particular Japanese stories of long careers and immediate hiring out of college. Ultimately, though, the situation of Chizu and other freeters is relatable to young workers around the world. Precarity, lack of emotional literacy, and lack of care all characterize Chizu’s social life, which falls apart repeatedly. Ginko observes that people are always “upping and leaving,” something Chizu herself will later do. But this is a socially enforced impermanence, not merely individual failure. I recognize much of my own social life in the world sketched by Aoyama. I fall into the same class of worker as Chizu. My own subjectivity often feels like it is constantly reacting to disappointment and alienation like Chizu’s. For instance, my life has been marked by a constant moving around for work. My relationships often fail or are interrupted because of relocation or my own volatility brought on by stress and the persistent gap between what I want and the means to achieve or even imagine it. (This is one way of describing class.) Like Chizu, my family is dispersed and I lack a close social circle for all of these reasons. Many relationships I do have are often surface level and traversed by pain and the unsaid—no one really has the wherewithal to address difficulties. More than anything, there is a prevailing sense of loneliness, as if there is a wider social world out there that I’m missing.   

Personal relationships are as shaped by class as they are by anything else, though we sometimes willfully forget this. The most meaningful relationship Chizu has is with Ginko, her relative, but she resists this relationship with a surprising fierceness. Despite Chizu’s best effort to annoy and belittle Ginko, Ginko still cares for her. Chizu struggles with this dynamic: “For some reason, the more Ginko made an effort, the more my own mood soured. I wanted to do everything I could to thwart her attempts at being beautiful.” Chizu eventually recognizes the complexity of their relationship: “Whatever the age gap, we were both still women. Our gazes collided, laced with a strange blend of hostility and solidarity.” How far this solidarity goes on Chizu’s part is unclear, but it isn’t gender that has brought them together. It’s economic necessity. Chizu and Ginko occupy the margins together and depend on one another in the face of precarity.

Unlike her relationship with Ginko, Chizu’s relationships with men end quickly. While she comes to recognize Ginko’s subjectivity, Chizu cannot grant these men any interiority or consciousness. The flatness of these male characters is a choice on Aoyama’s part, reflecting the quality of Chizu’s perception of others and men’s generalized incompetence within relationships. (An incompetence that is, at least partially, responsible for the birth strike in Japan.) Chizu sits with her old boyfriend Yohei playing video games in his apartment. They have bad sex. He cheats on her and that’s the end of that. She meets her next boyfriend, Fujita, at her train station snack bar job. Fujita is no better: he adds nothing to her life and sex with him is just as unsatisfying: “Having sex for the first time in a while was awkward. I kept having to remind myself how it all worked. When he took off his clothes, his body was the same pale color all over. The cats on the wall looked on. After we’d finished, I felt a wave of embarrassment.” Chizu couldn’t have narrated this with less passion if she tried—and she leaves out all the important bits! Like Chizu’s other social relations, sex is alienated. Doubly so: she observes rather than experiences this mechanical and unfeeling event

Fujita and Yohei have something in common: they perceive Chizu and, however minimally, make her feel as if she is real. Even if they can’t give her emotional sustenance because of relational incompetence, their mere presence feels like confirmation. After her breakup with Yohei, Chizu feels both “cleansed” and “invisible.” Without a boyfriend, she narrates, “my fingers and hair were beautiful only for me…I found myself longing for someone else to enjoy the fragrance [of my lotion].” Unrecognized socially through work and given no options for her ambitions or desires, Chizu craves recognition through her relationships with men. However, the men in Chizu’s life do not ultimately hold the power to give her the recognition she wants or deserves. And so they, too, drift away.

To cope with her disempowerment and loneliness, Chizu retreats into her subjectivity. This isn’t entirely a matter of willpower: it’s not that Chizu should just be better at making friends. In the face of few social resources, reproducing yourself, materially and psychically, is all you can do. Eventually, Chizu hits the bottom of her self-centeredness: “I felt somehow exhausted. Exhausted by my own endless inner monologues, by the blue of the sky, no longer what it had been in the summer, by the thin legs of the children, by this boring walk down this boring path, and by the life with the old lady waiting at the end of it.” Chizu is suddenly struck by boredom with her own interiority which she rightly recognizes as a response to the banality of the world. If boredom is often misplaced anger, then Chizu partially recognizes the world could be better than it is, that her experience could be richer. Where are we to find the off-ramp from boredom and alienation to plenitude and joy? 

The book does not directly answer this question, but it does figure an alternative image that helps us make sense of the rest of the book and where we might look for that off-ramp. On a train ride to meet yet another unsuitable man, Chizu witnesses something powerful. Standing on the train seat, a young girl is trying to open a window. Her mother “reluctantly” assists her. Together they open the window: “…the wind rushed in. “The girl’s ponytail bounced around, the hem of her blue skirt fluttering in the breeze.” It is this image of an older woman helping the younger that remains an unrealized promise of the book. But while Chizu leaves her behind and does not truly express gratitude, Ginko does open a window for Chizu. Ginko gives her a place to stay while Chizu figures out where she’s going next. Ginko also helps Chizu recognize her own violence, causing Chizu to wonder, for the first time, about the interiority of another. The younger woman, assisted by the older woman, learns to let life and love in, a refreshing burst of wind on the skin.

Kaelie Giffel is the author of University for a Good Woman: Reflections on Gender, Labor, and Class in American Higher Education from Lived Places Publishing. She writes about feminism, literature, and travel. You can find her at kaeliegiffel.com.