A Perfect Day to Be Alone A Novel

The English-language debut of a prize-winning Japanese author, this touching, subtly funny novel evokes the daily struggles and hopes of two women from different generations.

When her mother emigrates to China for work, 20-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with its two resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains.

Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establish an uneasy alliance, stress tested by Chizu’s flashes of youthful spite. As the four seasons pass, Chizu navigates a series of tedious part-time jobs and unsatisfying relationships, before eventually finding her feet and salvaging a fierce independence from her solitude.

A Perfect Day to Be Alone is a moving, microscopic examination of loneliness and heartbreak. With flashes of deadpan humor and a keen eye for poignant detail, Aoyama chronicles the painful process of breaking free from the moorings of youth.

Nanae Aoyama, born in 1983, is an acclaimed Japanese fiction writer. Her novel A Perfect Day to Be Alone received one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, the Akutagawa Prize. She has also won the Bungei Prize and the Kawabata Yasunari Literary Prize. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, German, French, and Italian.

Jesse Kirkwood is a freelance translator working primarily from Japanese and French into English. In 2020 he was awarded the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize for his translation of “Nocturne” by Yūshō Takiguchi. His new translation of Seichō Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2022.