Have you already read "All the lovers in the night"?

On yesterday's news paper, such an article was introduced.

all the lovers in the night  are announced one of  finalists and winners of  2023 National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Amazon page said

Bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami invites readers back into her immediately recognizable fictional world with this new, extraordinary novel and demonstrates yet again why she is one of today’s most uncategorizable, insightful, and talented novelists.

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyuko stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.

As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.

“In the skilled hands of Bett and Boyd, Kawakami’s prose is instantly recognizable—immediate, incisive, and unfailingly honest.”—Katie Kitamura, Entertainment Weekly(A Most Anticipated Book of 2022)

I didn't read it. 

Today I want to introduce another book. 

It is "Convenience Store Woman"

Amazon page said;

The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction―many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual―and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It’s almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action…

A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.

Unfortunately it hasn't been so popular.

2 years ago I read it.

And --. I couldn't show empathy.

However, my mother loved it.

Until two years ago, she could read books. Since it had been difficult to read books for her, she had enjoyed audible for awhile.

It was really difficult for me to choose her favorite book.

For the first time I chose authors who are as old as my mother. But she said "such books sounds authors proud of their health." So I coincidently choose "convenience store woman". She loved it. It was difficult to listen all of them at once, so she enjoyed listening it little by little every day.

This time, I read it again. And, I couldn't show empathy again. But I understand my mother's feeling. When we get weaker, we won't see or hear others who are in our same generation and spend active lives.