Love at Least

by Yukiko Motoya

translated by Kamil Spychalski

When Love Is the One Thing You Hope Will Hold

ARC REVIEW

Soft Skull Press | September 8, 2026

I am so sorry. I thought I was picking up a quick love story.

Yasuko is twenty-five, depressed, sleeping far too much and living with her boyfriend, Tsunaki. I assumed her life had stalled and that the book would be about the two of them trying to figure out their relationship while she tried to figure out what came next.

I was so wrong.

This story is about Yasuko and what it feels like to know something is wrong, to know you aren't functioning the way other people seem to, and still not know what to do with yourself. That was painful to read.

Yasuko Knows She Isn't Okay

One of the things that makes Yasuko so difficult to shake is that she isn't unaware of what is happening to her.

She knows she is depressed. She talks about it openly. She sleeps through huge parts of her life and struggles to move through ordinary days, while Tsunaki leaves for work and continues functioning in a world she seems increasingly disconnected from.

Early in the book, she tells us about shaving her head in high school and how badly everyone around her reacted. At the time, I didn't attach much significance to it. It felt like one more story from a young woman who already described herself as depressed and had never quite fit comfortably inside other people's expectations.

There are several moments like that. Motoya gives you information without telling you what to do with it. Some details seem almost incidental when they first appear. Later, they don't feel incidental at all.

I gradually realized I had not understood Yasuko nearly as well as I thought I had, and some of those earlier details began to look different.

Mental illness can look very different from the outside than it feels from inside the person living with it. Love at Leastnever made Yasuko feel like a collection of symptoms. She is angry, funny, difficult, needy, perceptive, exhausted and sometimes impossible, but her suffering never disappeared for me.

And Then There Is Tsunaki

Yasuko and Tsunaki have been together for three years, which surprised me when I realized it. Three years is a long time to live beside someone who is struggling this much, and I'm still struggling with understanding Tsunaki.

He works constantly and can seem detached. Sometimes I wondered whether he was helping Yasuko, enabling her, avoiding her, or simply doing the best he knew how to do. The arrival of an ex-girlfriend who wants him back makes the relationship even stranger, especially because she seems to have her own ideas about Yasuko and what Tsunaki should do with his life.

I kept wanting a simple answer about him, but the novella never gave me one.

Loving someone who is unwell does not automatically make you wise about what they need. Staying does not necessarily mean you are saving them. Leaving would not necessarily mean you never loved them.

Tsunaki is not the center of the novella, but his presence raises a question that kept following me: what can love actually do when the person you love cannot get control of their own life?

Love, At Least

This is only my reading of it, but Love at Least began to sound almost like a plea.

So much in Yasuko's life feels beyond her control. She can't make herself function normally. She can't simply decide not to be depressed. She can't become the person other people would find easier to live with.

So maybe love, at least.

If the rest of her life is unstable, maybe someone can still love her. Maybe that one thing can remain when everything else feels impossible.

A Very Short Book With a Lot Inside It

Love at Least is short, but I never felt as if I were reading something slight.

There is depression, family history, romantic dependence, jealousy, isolation, anger and the exhaustion of trying to live beside someone whose suffering you cannot fix. There are also moments where the book can be very funny, which somehow makes the painful parts feel even more human.

The ending is where everything the novella has been quietly building toward finally comes together. It changed the way I thought about several things I had read earlier in the book. More importantly, it changed the scale of Yasuko's suffering for me. That is where my first reaction came from.

I am so sorry.

Not because I pitied her. By the end, I understood enough to know how much anguish had been underneath everything I had been reading.

Kamil Spychalski's Translation

Kamil Spychalski's English translation read very naturally to me.

I never struggled to follow Yasuko's voice or the emotional movement of the story. There were a handful of Japanese words left untranslated, and I did stop to look some of them up because I wanted the fuller picture. None of them prevented me from understanding what was happening, but I noticed the choice.

Otherwise, the translation stayed out of my way, which mattered in a book this emotionally close.

Who Should Read Love at Least?

I would recommend this very easily, but not lightly.

Readers interested in Japanese literature, complicated relationships and fiction about mental illness will find a lot here. I also think it will work for people who like short books that leave considerably more behind than their page count suggests.

It made me think about other works I've read about psychiatric illness and anguish, including Notes from the Ward and An Na's The Place Between Breaths. I also thought about The Memory Bookshop and of course The Woman in the Purple Skirt.

This one hit a nerve for me.

I thought I was reading a quick love story. Instead, I finished feeling like I had spent a very short amount of time inside the life of a woman who desperately wanted to be loved while struggling to live with herself.

Just read it.

Where to Purchase

Bookshop.org. |. Amazon. |. Libro.fm

I received an advance copy of Love at Least from Soft Skull Press. Opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through one of these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.