‘If there was anyone I hated, it was likely to be Nishino.’

Who we love can often be surprising. There’s a whole industry of storytelling about that with many common tropes like enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity, you get the point. The Ten Loves of Nishino by [a:Hiromi Kawakami|637929|Hiromi Kawakami|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1403601895p2/637929.jpg], beautifully translated by [a:Allison Markin Powell|2744065|Allison Markin Powell|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], revolves around women who have fallen for the cool womanizer—Yukihiko Nishino—and how it has impacted their lives. What really works here is the way Kawakami has each chapter from a different woman’s perspective, focusing more on them than Nishino, who slowly comes into focus as we perceive him from teenage years to his death from the vantage points of those who he slept with. However, this book would be more aptly titled Ten Victims than Lovers and Nishino is such unbearable garbage manipulating his way into bedrooms and sobbing about his inability to remain monogamous as if it should make him pitiable instead of repulsive. Kawakami does well to show that even the worst of people have deep pains and scars and to remind us of empathy, though humanizing a sexual predator is an odd choice and even if you can feel for him it doesn’t mean I want to spend much time with him. Having very much loved The Nakano Thrift Shop and Strange Weather in Tokyo, this book was quite a disappointment despite having Kawakami’s signature calm and poetic prose and an exciting and effective narrative structure.

‘Kissing Nishino was wonderful. More wonderful than anything I had ever known. And kissing Nishino was also sad. It was one of the saddest moments I’ve ever known.’

I should have just listened to Luce’s review on this one, but even when the book was eye rollingly annoying I pressed on because I really do enjoy Kawakami’s storytelling. Particularly when she gets introspective, which there is plenty of in this novel. She does well to center the women in this novel instead of the abuser and shows how each of them has a rich and unique interior life despite Nishino’s insistence later on that ‘all the girls I’ve ever known, at least, they’ve all been the same’ (said in a scene bemoaning that women get upset over his infidelities as if somehow they are wrong for expecting him to, you know, not be lying constantly). The best of the chapters have Nishino more as scenery interjecting himself into their narratives, such as the chapter In the Grass that would work as a standalone coming-of-age short story about a girl dealing with the absence of her mother. While I understand what Kawakami is doing, the chapters that focus directly on sleeping with Nishino don’t work as well because he is so uninteresting and repulsive that each time you are just waiting for it to be over.

‘Nishino was cool. But his coolness was lined with warmth. That’s what was difficult to reconcile.’

Each chapter proceeds with another account on knowing Nishino, and it is quite an effective way to slowly reveal details about him while keeping him fairly enigmatic. You get very different impressions on him based on each speaker, though always conclude he is bad news. He is described as ‘savage,’ and later as ‘affable’, a person of ‘slippery, elusive perfection’ and almost always as someone who left a life worse than when he arrived. Each woman detects there is something emotionally wrong with him, saying things such as ‘It wasn’t that he tried so hard not to fall in love—rather it was perfectly natural for him not to feel love. He wasn’t capable of it.’ Yet when he sleeps with them, as with this narrator, they believe despite all that ‘now, he was in love with me.’

The biggest problem with this novel is that Yukihiko Nishino is pure toxic trash. I mean just an absolute dogshit human being. He gaslights everyone, he is emotionally manipulative and abusive, he has no regard for consent and definitely is okay with sexual assault as a way to seduce women. ‘I said, Stop, over and over,’ one woman tells us, ‘each time he quietly replied, I will not stop.’ When he is in his mid-fifties and dating an 18 year old college student, she pleads with him to wear a condom and he flat out refuses every single time and blames her for ovulating. Sure, these women do have real feelings for him, but its also important to consider how there are trillions of reasons women act polite to men or have a hard time breaking things off out of fear for their lives or other repercussions, particularly with a man who is fairly wealthy and well-connected like Nishino. He is described as being very good looking and is also an expert at emotional manipulation, making him rather dangerous.

Here is his own account of how his relationships go when they know he is sleeping with several women at once and promising each they are the One:

’Once it comes out...things are a mess for a couple weeks. About a month later, the strong willed ones (and occasionally a weak-willed one) will make up her mind to leave. As for the girl who’s left behind, the situation with her remains cheerful and pleasant for an average of three months. But once the thrill of victory is gone, the girl begins to reflect calmly upon Nishin’s past behavior and, by the fourth month, the accusations begging to fly...I just cant’t trust you anymore…I still love you but it’s too painful...’

Nishino creates some sort of weird sex Hunger Games between women and then feels like he is the victim when they aren’t down with him commintting constant infidelity. Just seems like not a great guy. That sort of energy is fucked up and we need to do better by everyone and not normalize that sort of weaponized misogyny.

Nishino breaks up close roommates by sleeping with them both and letting them be mad at each other, takes women he is dating on dinner dates to meet former girlfriends and watches them coldly interact, and, to be fair, lets each of them know other women are always calling him but insists to each one they are the special one. Which is his standard trick, to make each woman feel like they are The One despite all evidence to the contrary. Many admit ‘I had always assumed I would never fall for such a line,’ yet it works every time, even on the 18 year old who insists she doesn’t believe in love (that whole chapter is really creepy but does have some strong [a:Sally Rooney|15860970|Sally Rooney|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1534007127p2/15860970.jpg] vibes that makes it resonate). In a way, Kawakami is showing how manipulative men can be a wrecking ball. When each relationship inevitably breaks down, he proposes to them as a last ditch effort. When they turn him down because, at that point why wouldn’t they, he gives a teary speech about how he wanted to love them forever and more or less shames them for not being strong enough to love him despite his flaws. UGHHHH

Having the chapter where Nishino is dating the girl 40 years his junior comes as the second to last chapter, almost as a last straw for any goodwill you might possibly have for him. Then she returns to his own college years to finally give you a big key into his emotional state (one you may have guessed at earlier, in a really bizarre scene where he is breastfeeding from his older sister). I think the intent was to make you recontextualize everything you’ve read and pity him because you understand him better, but honestly, not working. Yea, I’m sad for him, but that doesn’t justify his actions or make me feel like I needed to spend that much time on him (which is saying a lot because it’s a very short book). If maybe he was less abusive this would have worked better but I think it’s okay to feel empathy for bad people while still having boundaries. Nishino is someone that manipulates women into feeling bad for him and does nothing but siphon women’s emotional energy and emotional labor. Boundaries are important, especially when not having them was causing these women emotional harm from thinking they had to be his emotional support as well as sleep with him on command (he repeatedly just grabs the women and holds them down to have sex, he even chains one to his bed while he is gone) and I wish Kawakami approached that more in the book. Honestly, I feel for the guy and it’s sad he won’t seek the help he needs, but also fuck him.

Which, to be fair, is a way in which misogyny is self-defeating as well. Nishino clearly has unprocessed trauma. Everyone mentions it and it is pretty clear he knows it as well. But instead of seeking any help he continues this pattern of toxic relationships that are helping nobody and because all his bad behavior is normalized it becomes something more like “oh, that Nishino yuk yuk yuk” instead of “holy shit man, get a therapist and stop relying on the emotional labor of women as unpaid therapy”. It’s a major reason we need to work towards removing the stigmas of mental health struggles and expand access to aid. This is particularly a problem in mindsets of masculinity where seeking help mental health is stigmatized as weakness. Pretty much everyone in this book is going through some stuff and nobody is dealing with it productively, which is just passing the torch of trauma from one person to the next and infecting everyone instead of handling it and ensuring it doesn’t cause anyone else harm. And that is the real tragedy of this story.

It is a real bummer that this book didn’t work because Kawakami is such a good writer and I have enjoyed her others a lot, but everyone gets one and I’m still eager to read more of her. I think this book opened up a lot of important topics on manipulation and abusive relationships, though it never quite added much productive commentary and overly relies on excusing Nishino for being unbearably toxic. The novel is from 2003 and this sort of discourse on toxic relationships wasn’t quite as nuanced and progressive then as it is today, but it still just doesn’t add much to anything beyond spending 150pgs rationalizing a sexual predator. It is nice that the women get all the depth though, and Nishino remains as shallow as he ever was. What does work, though, is that it centers the women affected by him and the multiple narration technique is really excellent. Kawakami may have a bit of a dud here but she continues to be an incredible writer.

2.5/5

‘I wondered it, even now, in whatever faraway place Nishino was, if he was being careful not to fall in love with someone. Was he chatting up all the girls—and seducing some of them—in that affable voice of his?’

undoubtedly a waste of time.

what was the point? nishino SUCKS. he dates two women at once, always going between relationships like a monkey on tree branches and somehow NEVER getting attached. i didn’t want to read 200 pages of women getting treated like crap for a good for nothing guy!!

also, what was the allure? can someone mcfreakin explain to me? did he shit gold or something?