Strange Weather in Tokyo

by Hiromi Kawakami

translated by Allison Markin Powell

This was our June book group choice, and it gave me more to chew on than I expected from a book where, on the surface, not much happens. Strange Weather in Tokyo is a love story between two lonely adults. It is also a love story that is going to make some readers uncomfortable. I will get to that.

What It's About

Tsukiko is in her late thirties, single, not especially looking for company. One night at her local izakaya she ends up next to an older man who turns out to be her former high school teacher. He places her right away. She doesn’t quite remember his name, so she just calls him Sensei, and that is what he stays for the whole book. It takes her much longer to place him.

What follows is not a romance in any hurried sense. They keep running into each other at the same bar. They drink. They eat. They talk, or sometimes they just sit near each other and say nothing. This goes on across seasons, with a lot of the connection happening over food and sake instead of through conversation. Slowly, without either of them chasing anything, the friendship turns into something else.

Both of them have chances to be with people closer to their own situations. Neither chance takes. They are lonely in the specific way of people who have made their peace with being alone and then have that peace interrupted. I will leave where it goes from there for you to find, except to say the ending is approriate, and it is not a tidy one.

A bit of background, because it is the kind of thing I like to know. The original Japanese novel is called Sensei no Kaban, which means Sensei's Briefcase, and it won the Tanizaki Prize in 2001, one of Japan's major literary awards. When it first came out in English the title stayed as The Briefcase before it was reissued as Strange Weather in Tokyo a few years later. The briefcase is an actual object in the book, so the original title is the one that tells you something.

What Stuck With Me

This is not a healing book. It is just a book. I mean that as a compliment.

There is a whole shelf of Japanese fiction in translation right now built to comfort you, the cat cafes and the second chances and the magic that fixes your life. This is the older, more grown-up relative of all that. Nobody here gets healed or steps into the light at the end. Two adults are lonely, they find each other, it isn’t extraordinary. Kawakami treats them like the fully formed people they are, with histories and habits and the kind of stubbornness real adults have. Allison Markin Powell's translation keeps all of it plain and unfussy, which is exactly right for these two.

Now the part that will divide people. He was her teacher. He is much older than her, a generation and then some. For a lot of readers that is going to sit wrong, and I understand why. I want to be honest that it is there and that it matters. For me, though, it mostly worked as seasoning. Take the age difference out and this is a lovely, completely normal love story about two people who needed each other. The age throws in a note that some will read as poignant and others will read as a problem. I landed closer to poignant, but I am not going to tell you that you are wrong if you do not.

The loneliness in this book is its own character, and it is something I have run into again and again in Japanese slice-of-life fiction. That ache of people living right next to each other and still mostly alone. I do not know what to make of how often it shows up, but I notice it every time, and Kawakami renders it without ever inflating it into a tragedy. It is just the weather these characters live in.

My Takeaway

So who is this for? Not everyone, and I want to be straight about that. If the premise bothers you on paper, it will probably bother you on the page, and that is a fair reason to skip it. But if you can take it on its own terms, you get a patient, adult, beautifully ordinary love story with one strange ingredient stirred through it. It does not try to heal you or teach you anything. It just lets you spend time with two real people. For me that was enough. Definitely worth the read.

If You Liked This

The Nakano Thrift Shop, also by Kawakami and also translated by Allison Markin Powell, has the same slow patience and a romance that sneaks up on you the same way. If it is the food and the loneliness you respond to here more than the romance, Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen is a good match.

One note on editions, since this was our book club pick. Some versions include a short companion story called Parade that takes place after the events of the novel. It is a small, quiet bonus, just one more afternoon with Tsukiko and Sensei rather than anything that changes the story. Others give you the novel on its own. So depending on which copy you read, you may or may not have it waiting for you at the end.

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