What happens to a person when she realizes at the age of thirty-four she has never made a choice? For her entire life Fuyuko has floated into opportunities when they’re offered to her, a brief sexual encounter, a job, a chance to make more money, passively and without pleasure.

She has one talent that her work as a proofreader has uncovered. She has an eye for mistakes and seeking them out becomes an obsession.

Without friends in her workplace, she accepts an offer to leave and work as a freelancer, at home. Living under no externally imposed schedule, Fuyuko works fifteen hours a day, falls into bed, and wakes up to do the same thing again. The only deviation in her robotic existence comes on her birthday which falls on Christmas Eve. Observing this alone, she's adopted the habit of going out for a walk on that night, a solitary observer, watching "layers and layers of clouds like an enormous silent creature, hung in the night sky."

Suddenly, almost without knowing it, Fuyuko makes a choice. She chooses to drink, at first out of curiosity and then as a compulsion, finding that sake and beer "let her escape her usual self."

One evening, hovering on the edge of passing out next to her kitchen wastebasket that holds unread promotional flyers, she begins to correct the errors that they contain. Suddenly one of them penetrates her alcoholic haze. A "culture center" offers a stunning assortment of community college courses and Fuyuko makes her second choice. She decides to sign up for one of the classes.

While waiting for her turn in a queue, sake rises up in her throat and she realizes she's going to be violently ill. On her way to the women's restroom, she's sick. Just sober enough to realize she may have spattered the shoes of a man she stood beside as she regurgitated, she finds him later to make an incoherent apology.

Then on her second attempt to enroll in a class, she passes out while sitting on a sofa. When she comes to, she finds her bag has been stolen and the man who had received her drunken apology on her first visit is by her side, taking care of her.

So begins an improbable friendship between two lonely people. Mitsutsuka is a 58-year-old bachelor who tells Fuyuko he teaches physics. In a series of meetings at a little coffee shop, the two of them discover a shared affinity for light. Fuyuko has no idea of why this natural phenomenon attracts her and Mitsutsuka is happy to give her a crash course in explanation. He gives her a book that explains the properties of light and a cassette disc that holds a lullaby composed by Chopin.

When Fuyuko finally listens to this music, she hears "the sound of melted light," as if "the night is breathing." Her senses begin to open. When she meets Mitsutsuka, she discovers his coat holds "the smell of winter." When he tells her "At night only half the world remains," he gives her the reason for her nocturnal birthday walks.

But both of them have undisclosed secrets. Fuyuko has always come to their meetings when she’s drunk. Mitsutsuka is bathed in a hidden shame. These secrets keep their meetings and their nascent feelings of attraction within the realm of fantasy--until Fuyuko stops drinking, a choice that changes their friendship.

Some novels have the quality of a watercolor painting and All the Lovers in the Night goes from an undeveloped black and white photographic negative to the soft, blurred beauty of pale water-drenched colors, carefully put on paper. This strange little novel of a late-blooming life becomes more and more unforgettable with every passing page, defying any fictional category and skirting any conventional plot. It may, however, launch many walks through many city nights, with readers searching for the elusive beauty that Mieko Kawakami has shown them.