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    Strange Weather in Tokyo: A Novel
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    Strange Weather in Tokyo: A Novel
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    Strange Weather in Tokyo: A Novel
    Ebook219 pages3 hours

    Strange Weather in Tokyo: A Novel

    By Hiromi Kawakami

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

  • This is a reissue of a poetic, compact novel by celebrated Japanese author, Hiromi Kawakami (the original 2012 Counterpoint edition was titled The Briefcase (9781582435992); Strange Weather in Tokyo is the title of the wildly successful UK edition (Granta)
  • Strange Weather in Tokyo was Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014 and won the Tanizaki Prize in 2001
  • This reissue will coincide with Europa's publication of Kawakami's The Nakano Thrift Shop (9781609453992, June 2017) and Counterpoint's re-release of Manazuru, another lauded Kawakami novel (9781640090187 August 2017)
  • "[In Japan] we have something called 'palm-of-the-hand stories,' brief and strangely evocative pieces of fiction so short they might fit in your palm…conjuring an underlying, unseen world that lies beyond with just a brief description or a few words." —Hiromi Kawakami
  • The two rereleased novels complement each other: both are concise, poetic meditations on the cyclic patterns of loneliness and love––one protagonist is in the city, the other is on the seaside
  • "Each chapter of the book is like a haiku, incorporating season references to the moon, mushroom picking and cherry blossoms…I cannot recommend Strange Weather in Tokyo enough, which is a testament to the translator who has skillfully retained the poetry and beauty of the original." —The Japan Society
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateNov 1, 2017
    ISBN9781640090170
    Unavailable
    Strange Weather in Tokyo: A Novel
    Author

    Hiromi Kawakami

    Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. Since the publication of God in 1994, she has written numerous novels and collections of short stories, including Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Thrift Shop. Her most recent novel, Running Water, was published in Japan in 2014 and won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Hiromi Kawakami has previously been awarded the Akutagawa Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages.

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    Reviews for Strange Weather in Tokyo

    4/5

    288 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      ‘Even a
      chance meeting is the result of a karmic con-
      nection.’
    • 5/5
      A lovely, quiet book. I read it in about three hours. About a socially awkward 37 year old woman who encounters and becomes friends with one of her former highschool teachers. The whole book is very much focussed on their relationship. And food and drink. A lot of drink. The descriptions of food are mouthwatering. The only two things I didn't care much for were a rather long dream sequence, and weirdness with quotation marks. I borrowed it through interlibrary loan, and now I'm going to have to find a print copy to keep.
    • 5/5
      Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami is a quiet, and quietly affecting story of a late thirties woman in Tokyo slowly developing a relationship with a now-elderly man who taught her in high school. Its dreamlike quality made me think of [Murakami], but her book has quite a different tone, more rooted in everyday life. It was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize last year.Office worker Tsukiko is a loner, but feels a sudden kinship with "Sensei" (at first she can't remember his name) when they meet by chance while drinking sake at a local bar. She is stubborn and fierce, while he is distinguished and measured. He does the pouring, because he is graceful and artistic, while she makes a rushed jumble of it. Their dialogue feels natural and true in its quirkiness. He can wax rhapsodic about something as mundane as tofu - "It's good warm. It's good chilled. It's good boiled. It's good fried. It's versatile," while Tsukiko is drawn to his "fair-mindedness": "It wasn't about being kind to me; rather, it was born from a teacherly attitude of being willing to listen to my opinion without prejudice. I found this considerably more wonderful than him just being nice to me."They go on a mushroom hunt with the bar's owner, they visit his wife's grave, they argue over baseball, they attend a high school reunion. In this fairly slim volume, [[Kawakami]]'s writing is spare and the environment she creates is mesmerizing. It seems to be an excellent job of translating by [[Allison Markin Powell]]. The gradual tenderness that grows between Tsukiko and Sensei is sweet, and in a Tokyo filled with office workers drinking alone in bars, the reader pulls for them to bridge their differences and build something lasting. The dream-like atmosphere, along with the humor, and the hope, made this a special read. Four and a half stars.
    • 5/5
      Tsukiko is an office worker in her early 40's lonely, living alone, and can't really see what the purpose of her life is. One night she meets her former Japanese teacher which she refers to as 'Sensei' as she can't remember his true name. Sensei is retired and more than 30 years her senior."Taking my seat at the counter, I ordered 'Tuna with fermented soybeans, fried lotus root, and salted shallots', while the old man next to me requested 'Salted shallots, lotus root fries, and tuna with fermented soybeans' almost simultaneously.They start a conversation and from then on without any formal arrangement, they keep meeting at the bar, arguing about baseball, talking about food and life in general. Tsukiko is stubborn and in a quiet way rebellious, where Sensei is composed, patient and witty and with this characteristics manages to draw Tsukiko out of her shell.This is a somewhat quiet story with themes of loneliness and melancholy and it was fascinating to see how the initial hesitant intimacy between Sensei and Tsukiko slowly and awkwardly turns into love. However, don't expect this to be a sad story. Nope, it's not. The story is despite the underlying themes quirky and funny and most of the story is about what is left unspoken, rather than what is actually said.Highly, recommended to anyone who enjoys contemporary Japanese fiction."It seemed strange to be surrounded by so many living things. When I was in Tokyo, I couldn't help but feel that I was always alone, or occasionally in the company of Sensei. It seemed that the only living things in Tokyo were big like us. but of course, if I really paid attention, there were plenty of other living things surrounding me in the city as well.""It was just dissatisfying in some way. It felt as if I had ordered some clothes that I had every reason to think would fit perfectly, but when I went to try them on, some were too short, while with others the hem dragged on the floor. Surprised, I would take the clothes off and hold them up against my body, only to find that they were all, in fact, the right length. Or something like that."
    • 5/5
      This is a lovely story taking place in Japan. Tsukiki is an unmarried woman, pretty lonesome at the time we meet her, who encounters a much older previous teacher of hers at a bar. She and he, whom she only addresses as Sensei, the respectful Japanese word for teacher or older person, become friends through chance encounters. When Tsukiki does not run into him, she longs for his companionship. He is very careful to maintain a respectful distance from her. We follow their relationship through all kinds of weather (the weather passages are so beautiful), in various places, through all kinds of culinary experiences, and in various states of inebriation. The lingering questions are...does he really love her...and will he ever sleep with her?
    • 3/5
      This was a poignant, surreal and oddly touching book, about unrequited love changing to mutual love. The main character is adrift, moving through life aimlessly. A chance encounter with an old school teacher in a bar changes everything. At first, nobody knows where things are going, but then Tsukiko takes charge of a sort. The emotional remove between the two protagonists is at once frustrating and endearing. It made me think of Botchan at times, with the formality and hidden meanings and the way nobody seems to get to the point, of Murakami's appreciation of loneliness at others.
    • 4/5
      This was a surprise. I picked it up at the library because I thought the cover was pretty and I'm a sucker for Japanese authors. Using sparse prose, Kawakami explores several different themes including the differences between contentment and happiness, the effects of prolonged nostalgia/loneliness, and the impact of large age differences on interpersonal relationships. This book was simple but not simplistic... if that makes sense? I enjoyed it.
    • 3/5
      Tsukiko Omachi likes to frequent a saké bar after work. She likes to sit and drink and eat the food prepared there and pass the time. She is a solitary drinker. But her solitude is disturbed one evening when she notices the elderly man sitting a few seats further down the bar. She recognizes him as Mr Harutsuna Matsumoto, but her whole life she has always thought of him and called him “Sensei”. He was her Japanese literature teacher in school. Now he is long retired, another solitary drinker who likes to quietly partake of saké and bar food. Over the course of the next two years, Tsukiko and Sensei will move closer, both literally in starting to sit beside one another but also in the development of tender feelings. This is a winter/summer romance that is as fresh and fragile as any new love. That it can only last a limited time is a mere detail since all lovers are finite though love is not.Sensei is extremely formal, rigid, and concerned with propriety. Yet he quickly develops affection for his former pupil (despite chastising her for being such a poor student). Tsukiko is perhaps more difficult to fathom. She is in her late thirties at the outset, single but self-sufficient. She works in an office is all we know but we never learn what kind of work she does. She does not appear to have had too many romantic entanglements over the years. But even she acknowledges that she suffers from a kind of arrested development. Indeed, she increasingly sounds more like a schoolgirl than a mature woman. Is this a curious aspect of her particular character, or is it a kind of infantilization which serves to underwrite (and justify?) the protective tone that Sensei takes on? It is difficult to tell. Certainly Tsukiko seems excessively young — far younger than her actual age. And that exaggerates the difference between her and Sensei. (Indeed, the fact that she insists on thinking of and referring to him as “Sensei” enforces the disparity between their relative positions in the relationship.) Yet the overall story continually strives for a poignancy that could not be achieved if any crass exploitation of their differences were at hand. In the end, this is a quietly observed love story (accompanied by a prodigious amount of alcohol). It is, as others have described it, enchanting. Gently recommended.
    • 4/5
      Tsukiko, a Tokyo office-worker in her late thirties, is drawn into conversation by the elderly man drinking sake next to her in a neighbourhood bar - it turns out that he's her former high-school Japanese literature teacher. The two of them don't seem to have much in common - they're thirty years apart in age, and Tsukiko was never a good student and still has a deaf ear for classical poetry. She addresses her old teacher as "Sensei" not so much out of respect but rather because she can't remember his name at first. But they somehow drift into being companionable drinking acquaintances, then friends, then (after many quarrels about unimportant things) discover that they really need each other's company. This is a very engaging, delicate-but-funny (occasionally even surrealistic) May-to-December romance and a commentary on modern urban loneliness, but I think Kawakami is also enjoying herself pulling the reader's leg a bit - while Tsukiko is to all appearances a classic western chick-lit character, the detail of the story is obsessively Japanese to the point of self-parody - the over-specified food, the discussions about the correct way to pour sake, the activities Tsokiko and Sensei share (mushroom-hunting, a calligraphy exhibition, a vegetable market, a hot-springs inn, a pachinko parlour, a passionate night of octopus-related haiku-composition...). And then there's the odd figure of Sensei's presumably-dead wife, as subversively odd as Sensei is conservatively old-fashioned. There's definitely a bit more going on here than an unlikely love-affair!
    • 4/5
      Two people who don't form the usual sort of couple and aren't handy with their feelings or relationship dynamics circle into their own version of being a pair. An engaging and expressive translation.
    • 4/5
      A sad but exquisitely beautiful read. Dream like, poetic and one that will certainly stay with me. It also made me want to eat delicious Japanese food and drink sake.