Marriage Was a Drag, So She Found New Lives in Her Dreams

THE THIRD LOVE, by Hiromi Kawakami; translated by Ted Goossen

An eccentric older man is attempting to enlighten or impress a woman decades younger than him, whom he met when she was still a girl. I hesitate to open a book review with etymology, but that old man started it. The word kanashii, he tells the woman, who happens to be heartbroken, didn’t always mean “sad”; it meant “dear.” Centuries ago, the term tried to convey both your beloved and the likelihood you would lose them, lending it a connotation that eventually led to the word’s more lugubrious usage today.

This conversation occurs on a bench in modern-day Tokyo, near the end of Hiromi Kawakami’s novel “The Third Love,” published in Japan in 2020 and translated into English by Ted Goossen. The book traces one woman’s love affairs across decades and dreamscapes: She falls for her high school sweetheart and finds herself trapped in an old story, so she sets her sights on even older tales. If I am writing somewhat ambiguously here, it’s because Kawakami herself invents a narrative language that traverses timelines and dialects, by which a surrealist depiction of a woman’s coming-of-age emerges.

Riko, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, marries young. When her husband cheats on her, she sees “two paths” forward: “Either follow my many sisters who have striven to lay claim to the men they loved, or resign myself to the futility of holding a man to his promises.” To Riko’s keen eyes, the first route is built atop “Western ideas of romantic love,” mirages that stand in stark contrast to the more “down-to-earth” approach taken by women in prior generations. Rejecting the notion of a direct path entirely, she proceeds, obliquely and interdimensionally, into fantasy.

A childhood crush — an elementary school janitor turned monkish spiritual adviser — teaches her how to control her dreams and transform them into cohesive worlds. Each evening, Riko dives into elaborate reveries drawn from the plots of canonical Japanese masterpieces, as seen through something between rose-colored glasses and a kaleidoscope.

Soon, she’s leading a double life: By day, she is a devoted wife and mother in modern Japan, and by night she is, alternately, a 17th-century courtesan in Edo (now Tokyo) and a princess’s lady-in-waiting a thousand years ago, during the Heian period. Under cover of night, not to mention REM, Riko slips into torrid affairs and silk dresses, sells sex, steals moments of unadulterated pleasure and forges bonds with other love-struck women. Fed up with “wandering in a dense fog” in the wake of her husband’s affairs, her “heart flew off to Edo,” where she finds such satisfaction that her husband begins to wonder why she’s not more disturbed by his infidelity.

If she appears placid on the surface, it’s only because the disturbances her husband and the spiritual adviser have wreaked on her worldview are seismic. Her dreamscapes shift the tectonic plates of her waking life: New emotional terrain requires new forms of transport. A reader could accuse Kawakami of reducing liberation to an imaginative exercise, denying the possibility of feminist change in the real world. But what her protagonist discovers reads as radically feminist to me, a way of living that no longer privileges the role of wife over that of friend, daughter, mother, intellectual compatriot, co-conspirator.

Kawakami’s writing is impishly glib and sometimes gut-wrenchingly naïve, hitting the reader with the gale-force wisdom of a child’s accidentally proverb-laden speech. Her prior novels dabble in science fiction and age-gap relationships; one might regard her oeuvre as a magical realist exploration of love across generations and genders.

When a character waxes pretentious on the disparities between koi, which connotes passionate, erotic love, and ai, an almost self-abnegating, sweeping adoration for the world itself, Riko wonders: “Did all that romantic stuff really exist, or were these abstract terms just an elevated form of wordplay?” What she finds is that so-called wordplay, the endless redescribing and redefining of experience, actually fashions the life it’s meant to trace — especially if your definition of “life” is chameleonic enough to include all the impossible stories in the one you thought was yours.

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