Love at Least:A Novel

Love at Least is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar brought into the fraught, twenty-first century world of Japanese contemporaries

Twenty-five-year-old Yasuko has been living with her kind but apathetic boyfriend Tsunaki for three years. During this time, she has suffered waves of depression and hypersomnia, staying in bed for days on end, mired in ennui.

Taking over some of the house chores when Tsunaki begins working longer hours, hoping to break out of her rut, turns into a disaster. An attempt at cooking dinner ends with her sobbing in a pitch-black hallway, groping around for the tripped circuit breaker. Desperate to be “functional,” Yasuko lands a part-time job at a restaurant where, for the first time, she experiences a warm, family-like environment. But when the care from her coworkers eventually suffocates her, her manic-depression returns, and she storms out of the restaurant. 

Confronting her brokenness, she questions what she has been afraid to face and asks Tsunaki: Why is he with her? Radical, comical, and energetic, Love at Least is a sincere and compelling story of young love. | YUKIKO MOTOYA is the author of The Lonesome Bodybuilder. She won the Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016, the Noma Prize for New Writers for Warm Poison in 2011; the Kenzaburo Oe Prize for Picnic in the Storm in 2013; and the Mishima Yukio Prize for How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014.

KAMIL SPYCHALSKI is a Japanese-English translator and the winner of the 7th JLPP International Translation Competition. His translations include Taiyo Fujii’s “Prayer,” which appeared in The Best of World SF Volume 1 (Head of Zeus), and Summer’s Passage, a prize-winning novella by Kenji Maruyama. He lives in Fukuoka.