Love at Least: A Novel

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar for twenty-first-century Japan, a young woman suffering from depression embarks on a series of darkly comic domestic disasters that lead her to question whether she is worthy of love

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

When Tsunaki begins working longer hours, Yasuko tries to take over some of the house chores in the hope of breaking out of her rut, but cannot even manage to cook dinner without ending up sobbing in a pitch-black hallway. Any attempt to get her life together seems only to highlight Yasuko’s brokenness. As everything threatens to fall apart, she makes a spectacular last-ditch effort to wrench Tsunaki out of his indifference and find something to ground her in the world.

Radical, comical, and energetic, Love at Least is a sincere and compelling story of a young woman searching for connection.

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.

"Motoya balances a raw, unfiltered examination of a woman pixilated by mental illness with an anti-love story that unsettles and lingers." —Booklist