Yuki Nogami has taken the day off. She is at the theatre with a friend. Work calls anyway.

In Matsukoi Sugie’s account of this early scene, what ought to be a small favour keeps producing another task. And once her boss notices that she has read a message, reading it becomes a reason to call. The leave has been approved. She has reached the theatre. Yet getting there has not made the afternoon hers.

It is an immediately recognizable predicament, even before Emi Yagi begins to move it toward fantasy. Later, an instructor in a recorded workplace training video starts addressing the woman watching him. Work has already followed her home; a figure from work now seems capable of crossing a much stranger boundary.

For someone who has been unable to sleep for months, the ordinary distinction between a working day and the time beyond it is already difficult to maintain. Yagi makes that difficulty the beginning of an adventure. The public descriptions and interviews introduce a woman trying to recover something that other people still do without thinking.

A company committed to wellbeing

Nogami works for a health-food company. According to the publisher’s introduction, her insomnia has persisted for about eight months. The irony is close at hand: an employee cannot rest in an organization that makes a point of caring about health and happiness.

Its expectations include prompt responses, positive communication, and an emphasis on solutions rather than criticism. Taken separately, these hardly sound sinister. Most of us would prefer a colleague who answers a question, and few people enjoy a meeting that never gets beyond complaints.

But the rules sound different to a person who has run out of energy. Alongside doing the work, she must produce an acceptable manner of doing it. Frustration becomes something else to manage before she can tell anyone what is wrong.

There is a small, painful change of subject here. Instead of asking why she is exhausted, she can end up asking why she is so bad at handling exhaustion. A workplace that speaks fluently about happiness may have surprisingly little patience for an unhappy person.

In her interview with Tasako Miura for anan, Yagi connects the novel’s starting point to her own experience of insomnia. She is troubled by a familiar promise in the language of sleep improvement: rest well so that tomorrow you will perform better. Sleep, supposedly something for the sleeper, is recruited into another day’s productivity.

The objection is not that nobody should want to work well. It is that a person’s wish to sleep should not need that further justification. Nogami wants to sleep tonight. Before that simple desire can be met, more and more requirements seem to attach themselves to it.

Even being cared for takes work

At home, Nogami is not left entirely on her own. Her husband wants to help her improve her habits. There are meals to consider and new approaches to try. As the publisher’s more detailed introduction explains, he even rents a chicken whose companionship is supposed to be therapeutic.

A chicken is an excellent way of making an increasingly elaborate programme of care suddenly visible. The detail is funny, but the underlying motion is familiar: surely there must be one more thing that will work. If the last suggestion failed, perhaps another adjustment will succeed.

For the person receiving the suggestions, that can become a busy form of helplessness. Someone has taken trouble on your behalf. Saying that you cannot bear another solution may feel ungrateful. The help has arrived with an expectation that you will do something with it.

This does not require us to read every gesture as a secret plot. Well-meant assistance can still crowd out the recipient’s account of what she needs. There is a difference between staying beside someone in a difficulty and continually specifying the person she ought to become in order to escape it.

Nogami has not yet become that person. Around her, the remedies keep arriving. The chicken gives this exhaustion a faintly ridiculous shape without making the exhaustion itself ridiculous.

That balance is part of the attraction of the premise. A reader can laugh at what has turned up in the house while still remembering that the woman living there has very little strength left.

The man inside the recording

The training instructor, Satoru Idefuyu, offers a more startling arrangement. He says that he can help Nogami sleep if she gives him a little of her soul.

This is a publicly disclosed premise, not the solution to the book’s mysteries. It changes the register of the familiar bargain: keep giving something of yourself, and eventually things will improve. An online course has become an encounter with someone whose terms deserve rather more scrutiny.

In her conversation with Asayo Takii, Yagi explains that she did not want simply to report her own symptoms. Discussion with her editor about how to get a story moving helped bring the instructor into being. The connection with the contract in Faust then gave the idea further room to develop.

That is useful background because it prevents the novel from being mistaken for a disguised advice book. The insomnia supplies the predicament, but the fiction needs meetings, uncertainty, and a next event. We want to know who is approaching Nogami, what they offer, and what they might require in return.

Another arrival is Meshizawa, who delivers a lactic-acid drink. In the anan interview, Yagi explains how she used the limited channels of contact available to a woman largely working at home. People already encountered through a screen or at the door could begin to enter her changing experience of reality.

The strange world does not need an unrelated portal. The channels through which ordinary life reaches her are sufficient. That makes the premise especially appealing to anyone who has spent a day indoors while feeling constantly available to everyone outside it.

Sugie’s review compares the developing fantasy to Lewis Carroll. It is worth treating that as an invitation to expect a world slipping out of its familiar proportions, rather than an instruction to match every character to a figure from Alice. The story can remain surprising.

A different kind of night reading

At 184 pages in its Japanese book edition, Anti-Good Morning is a relatively compact prospect. Its publicly described ingredients include office life, the unease of receiving care, and an increasingly fantastic attempt to find rest.

The interviews suggest an approach that makes room for comedy without treating distress lightly. Takii praises the playfulness of the writing; Yagi describes an interest in extending jokes until the boundary between the realistic and the impossible becomes harder to draw. Humour offers movement where a straightforward account of suffering might seem trapped.

These are reasons to be curious about the book. Readers who require tightly realist plotting may also want to know that the fantasy is central to the invitation.

The interest of Nogami’s strange encounters lies in the decisions and relationships they open up.

Will another offer give her room to breathe, or ask for another part of her? What happens when being helped feels like being given more work? The novel leaves those questions attached to a particular, tired person.

Everybody seems ready to tell her what a better life will require. For a little while, it may be worth not joining them. Listen to what the woman who has already tried so hard still has to say.