Hiromi Kawakami writes the sort of novels you can love for their atmosphere alone. Her characters lead attractively unelaborate lives and are united in their attitude of equable epicureanism ...That’s the distinctive Kawakami atmosphere. It’s the reason for her cult following ...The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino, will satisfy aficionados ... Pinned down on the page of a newspaper, The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino risks sounding creepy. This slight book’s beguiling and beautiful mystery is best left for readers to discover by themselves.

The novel’s chapters, each recounting a brief dalliance, provide a tantalizingly incomplete mosaic of this elusive Casanova, from his lusty school days to his sad final years seducing housewives ... He’s the Don Draper of Japanese fiction, the sort of person everyone knows without ever really knowing ... The Freudian explanation is anticlimactic, not least because it rings false—people are greater than the sum of their childhood traumas, after all. As with Nishino himself, it’s mystery that makes Ms. Kawakami’s book so enticing.

If ostensibly always about Nishino, this is, of course, also very much the women's book -- their stories, and their lives, in which Nishino happened to play a(n often significant (and memorable) -- but very temporary) role. Here, too, we only see slivers of their lives, rather than full pictures, but Kawakami's rich, varied cast does make for intriguing glimpses of these different lives, and ultimately an impressive panoramic view of contemporary Japanese women's lives. Leaving aside a few odd touches...The Ten Loves of Nishinois a neat little semi-ronde of a novel, quite well balanced between the man at its center and the women here who reveal themselves, and him, in their various portrait-reminiscences

This procession of erotically charged encounters is fascinating to read, but it admits of no change, no development. Nishino never shares anything of his inner self with any of the women he encounters, and readers following along through each of those encounters will quickly begin to suspect this is because he has no inner self to share. This would be interesting on a plotting level if all the women he meets were shallow and undiscriminating, but not all of them are: some, we get the strong impression, would see through this romantic grifter in two seconds, and indeed, some do - but it doesn’t stop them from breaking bread with him. If the book is intended as a commentary on the bleak nature of modern romance culture, it’s as insightful as it is depressing ... Powell is an experienced translator from the Japanese, so we can assume that the flat, affectless artlessness on every page of the book is the author’s decision rather than the translator’s failure, an assumption bolstered by the curiously monochrome tone of so much translated contemporary Japanese literature, regardless of who’s doing the translating. Whatever its origin, the drab prose throws extra emphasis on the plot, and as one of Nishino’s women mentions, 'The trouble with wanting all of a boy like Nishino was that it was predictable.'

The search for meaning and identity in an unforgiving environment is a well-trodden path. However, Kawakami states the obvious with such acuity that her prose becomes resonant. The simplicity of the stories and their style is deceptive. Underneath it lies layers of significance on to which each re-reading sheds a little more light. Endlessly thought-provoking, The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino is all the more remarkable for couching its insights in such accessible terms.