Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan

‘Japan’s ageing society’ today is a commonly and globally recognised ‘issue’: pretty much everyone seems to have something to say about it, offering a diagnosis and fancying a solution. This discursive incitement, however, often obscures the voices of older people themselves, the very people to whom aged subjectivity and sociality are of real, practical and existential import. Iza Kavedžija’s Making Meaningful Lives is an invitation to listen to such voices. Exploring the lived experience of older women and men in two neighbourhoods in Osaka, she focuses on various acts of care and storytelling through which they make sense of their life. Much of this storytelling is anchored to the ‘salon’, a café-esque communal space established in the neighbourhood. A concrete space of discursive and material exchange, the salon serves as a place where its participants cultivate an emergent sense of sociality through ‘links of care’ (p. 7). As one participant puts it, ‘this salon is the source of our well-being’ (p. 5). Kavedžija connects her interlocutors’ singular life stories to general existential questions that concern us all: autonomy and mutuality, privacy and intimacy, self and alterity. In particular, she explores ‘the good life’ –what makes a life ‘worth’ living (ikigai) – as the central question of ‘existential anthropology’, ‘an investigation of the ways in which people try to make their lives their own in the face of adversity and constraint’ (p. 6). Notwithstanding the gravity of such questions, Kavedžija’s calm and unassuming prose invites us to withhold our usual expectation for narrative rupture and closure. Everything in this ethnography happens quietly: ‘Here, existential dramas did not play out in the form of ruptures or discrete events, but quietly, in everyday life’ (p. 6). Irreducible to narrative dénouement, the salon participants’ ‘dramas’ consist of acts of delicate ‘balancing’ – a recurring theme featured throughout the book. Kavedžija demonstrates that they co-construct the meaning of the good life and their ‘disposition to care’ (p. 172) through negotiating differences in a dialectic tension within the seeming orderliness of the everyday. Chapter 6 explores this balancing in terms of a dialectic between intimacy and independence, between the burden of connection and the risk of freedom, and Chapter 3 reveals how ‘distance, or a certain degree of separation’ (p. 53) is an enabling condition, not a hindrance, in the enjoyment of social connection for