“Kind and courteous”, attentive to women and (above all) interested in their lives, he drifts from one affair to another, often running his liaisons in parallel. Yukihiko Nishino, whom we glimpse in different settings with a variety of partners at successive stages of his life, is a sort of salaryman Don Juan. Certainly, The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino makes use a distinctively Japanese scaffolding, as its ten interlinked stories build into this multi-faceted mosaic of a novel. I suspect, though, that the resemblance owes more to a shared tradition of poetry and prose alike than to joint membership of some Pacific school of kooks. True, Kawakami arguably shares some traits with the tiny cluster of contemporary female novelists from Japan allowed to cross the bridge into English – even though few readers would confuse her with the more overt absurdism of Banana Yoshimoto, or the richly Gothic twists and shocks of Yōko Ogawa.

Granta’s cover, with its trick shot of a levitating lady on a city street, recycles the stereotypical notion of modern fiction by Japanese women as a low-calorie feast of quirky, wistful charm: gently surrealist sushi, with portions of falling blossoms and rainbow guppies on the side. The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino dates from 2003 – translations, especially from Asia, often reach Anglophone readers like far-travelling light from a remote star. Now, after the acclaim that greeted her version of The Nakano Thrift Shop, Markin Powell returns with another Kawakami work first published in the early years of the millennium.

The ten loves of mr nishino review