A mournful, beautiful novel, quite unlike anything I've read. The author writes with idiosyncratic detail and with a sincere voice, and it makes for a subtle and arresting story.
Our main character, Tsukiko, is 37, alone, passive, and buffeted about by life. She is socially awkward, drinks a little too much, and doesn't know what she wants. But while stumbling down the road towards becoming a Japanese version of a cat lady, she has a moment of bravery.
And what begins as sort of a weird, borderline-inappropriate friendship with her former high school teacher--Tsukiko calls him "Sensei" out of both habit and respect--gradually blossoms into something that feels innocent and proper. They meet for lunch, have beers together, go on various excursions together. Sensei reminds this reader of the teacher in Eugen Herrigel's wonderful Zen in the Art of Archery: imperturbable, modest, even simple-seeming, but yet a man with surprising and unusual interests.
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Alcohol seems to be an interesting symbolic element in this novel. It's of course a social lubricant in all cultures, but with these characters it seems to liberate them to commit certain out-of-character actions, like being obnoxious, or insulting, or even amorous.
Throughout the story characters kind of bonk into each other; there doesn't seem to be a lot of directed action in the plot or in their behavior. Far from being active and volitional, they seem to passively accept and accede to whatever unfolds around them. It's an unusual way to tell a story, a story in which on one level not all that much happens. And while it is possible that an impatient western reader might find this story frustrating and slow, at the same time it is filled with a strange and beautiful tension. Quite a remarkable and memorable book.
Bear with me as I share one last thought. Years ago during my Wall Street life, I was having lunch with three female colleagues. One of the women had been struggling over a young man who she thought was interested in him, but they had been sort of orbiting each other, waiting; neither was willing to say or do anything too obvious. She asked us all what we thought she should do, and one of the other women gave her a blunt piece of advice: "You have to take what you want." It was the most Nietzschean thing I'd ever heard.
But she was right. You have to take what you want in this life. Don't wait for it to come to you. Take it.
[Readers, as always, what follows here are just my notes--in this case mostly quotes and plot events. I recommend actually not reading them at all, in fact I think reading them may ruin the novel by reducing its strange and unusual atmosphere to mere plot points. Note also that Strange Weather in Tokyo is short--even shorter than Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Better just to read it if you're curious about it.]
Other novels by Hiromi Kawakami:
The Nakano Thrift Shop
People From My Neighborhood
The Ten Loves of Mr. Nishino
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Parade
Notes/Chapter Summaries:
Chapter 1: The Moon and the Batteries
We meet the two characters. The young woman, Tsukiko, is 37. The teacher, with white hair, is some thirty years older than her. They first encounter each other in a train station bar/restaurant, where they coincidentally order similar food at the same time. He introduces himself, she recognizes he was her Japanese teacher in high school but she can't remember his name. He's quite formal, he doesn't talk that much, and--strangely--he invites her to his house; the two of them begin a sort of habit where they would go to his house after having a drink at this bar, and then have a final drink at his house. She calls him Sensei; he talks about his wife who had passed away; finally, there's an anecdote here where he stores and saves old batteries: he doesn't want to throw them away because he thinks it would be disrespectful after all the services these batteries performed for him. (!) The chapter ends with him reciting poems.
Chapter 2: Chicks
They agree to meet for a walk on a market day; she respects the way he meticulously pours beverages, she simply can't do it like he does, in fact he doesn't even like her to pour his drinks for him; he would rather pour them for himself; they wander through the stalls in the market, talking, and he buys two baby chickens, and a male and a female.
Chapter 3: Twenty-Two Stars
The reader learns that the Tsukiko and Sensei are having a fight and not speaking to each other; they show up to the same train station bar/restaurant but don't sit next to each other or speak to each other at all. It's a strange chapter: we learn the fight stemmed from a discussion about baseball. Tsukiko hates the Yomiuri Giants--although she doesn't really follow baseball--and Sensei loves the Giants, and when the Giants will a game as it is playing on the radio in the restaurant, he's happy about it, to the point where he kind of taunts her because she doesn't seem to like the team. In the wake of this fight Tsukiko realizes Sensei is the only person she talks to or does anything with; she does everything alone, she's alone and lonely, and as she thinks about this in her own internal narration she realizes that when she does things with Sensei he makes her feel "proper" somehow. She buys him a small vegetable grater as a gift and as an apology, and, coincidentally, the next time she is at the bar, Sensei asks her "Would you like to come sit over next to me?" She says yes. As they leave the bar she gives him the grater.
Chapter 4: Mushroom Hunting, Part 1
At the bar/restaurant a conversation came up about mushrooms; Sensei appears to know a lot about them, and the bar owner, Satoru, asks Sensei and Tsukiko if they'd like to come with him to hunt mushrooms. They all agree. This sort of opens up a friendlier and less formal relationship with the bartender/restaurant owner as they head out into the country for mushrooms in his car. Funny scene here where the restaurant owner is a terrible driver: he keeps turning around to talk to them and not watching where he's going. "I might have liked to know more about these modashi mushrooms, or to share just how strict a teacher Sensei had been, but since Satoru kept turning all the way around if whenever he spoke to us, Sensei and I made sure not to seem too interested in eliciting small talk." The Sensei dresses for the mushroom hunting expedition in a tweed suit and leather shoes and he carries a briefcase, with no concern whatsoever about getting dirty; once again, he is imperturbable. Sensei handles climbing the hills with no problem, whereas Tsukilo quickly tires trying to keep up, she's out of shape. They find a caterpillar that Sensei puts into a plastic bag in his briefcase. The group meets with success, they find all kinds of mushrooms, "lots more than last year!"
Chapter 5: Mushroom Hunting, Part 2
Tsukiko sits in the forest, observing all the life around her; listening to the birds singing, seeing the bugs, the mushrooms, moss and fungus everywhere; she thinks about Tokyo and how she never really acknowledged that any of the people around her had any inner lives--except for Sensei. The reader sees her break out of her solipsism, at least briefly: "I never gave any thought to the fact that they were leading the same kind of complicated life as I was." Sensei discusses some of the things about mushrooms he had learned, especially poisonous mushrooms and how they resemble edible ones; he launches into a story about his wife, we learn that she ran off fifteen years ago; Tsukiko assumed that his wife had died. Sensei tells a story about his wife when she ate a particularly poisonous mushroom called the Big Laughing Gym mushroom; they had to rush her to a hospital, and yet all the while she's emitting these strange sounds; it turns out that neither Sensei nor their son even enjoyed hiking in the first place. "My wife was a difficult person, but I wasn't so different. I used to think that we complemented each other--like the saying goes: Even a cracked pot has a lid that fits. But, as it turned out, I guess I didn't fit my wife very well."
The the reader experiences a surreal scene as the group eats mushrooms together, but there's an undercurrent of concern that they may have eaten psychedelic mushrooms by accident; they enjoy sake and fresh tomatoes and other snacks, the group is laughing as they go back to the car. Tsukiko asks Sensei if he still loves his wife, even after she ran off. "He boomed with laughter. 'My wife is still an immeasurable presence in my life,' he said somewhat seriously, before breaking into laughter again." All four of them are acting strangely, it seems like they're all tripping; the author inserts just enough uncertainty in this scene to make the reader wonder.
Chapter 6: New Year's
Tsukiko accidentally breaks a long fluorescent light bulb in her kitchen and then cuts her foot deeply on the glass shards. It's New Year's Day and she muses about seeing her family for the New Year's holiday: her mother, her older brother and his wife and kids; how they lecture her about how she should get married. There is an uncomfortable scene with Tsukiko and her mother, they can't really talk comfortably with each other, they stand together doing the dishes silently. Tsukiko tells the reader in her narrator voice about a boyfriend she used to have who she drifted apart from, and how she doesn't understand how to be in love. These appear to be joint scenes of both foreshadowing (to New Year's with her family) and flashback (of her old boyfriend); now we're back to after her cutting her foot on glass. This boyfriend ended up marrying a friend of hers and she went to their wedding: "I remember thinking to myself that there wasn't a chance in a million that I would ever encounter a love fated in the stars." She tries to peel an apple like her mother and the skin of the peel breaks--and she bursts into tears, surprising herself. "I would soon turn forty, yet here I was acting like a little girl."
She heads outside for a walk, gets lost and randomly [and implausibly] encounters Sensei. She pinches her own hand to make sure she wasn't dreaming. Then a short scene here where they go to a bar to talk and have a drink; she lies to him about having boyfriends. This scene seems surreal, unreal, as if she actually is dreaming.
Chapter 7: Karma
A discussion here of Tsukiko's preference for Wilkinson's Superior Products brand soda water and ginger ale; [the reader can't help but note that much of her inner mental conversation is about ersatz information, quite a contrast from Sensei who recites poetry. People need guidance and leadership sometimes]. "Often when I was alone, such were the contents of my head. Random thoughts about the Wilkinson brand or a European trip from the distant past would bubble up in my mind, like effervescent carbonation... I'm not speaking to the me who is visible there, but rather to an invisible version of myself that I sense hovering somewhere in the room."
She encounters Sensei again, this time for real, and he unexpectedly blurts out, "Tsukiko, my butt hurts." She replies, "What happened to your butt?" and he says "A young lady shouldn't use a word like 'butt.'". They go for meal together and have a discussion about karma; then they are verbally accosted by a drunk young man in the restaurant who is angered and enraged by the fact that Sensei is so much older than Tsukiko. The drunk man passes out and begins snoring at the restaurant counter. Tsukiko goes to the bathroom and then she comes back Sensei presented her with one of the diamond earrings that was in the drunk man's ear. "'I stole it.' His expression was perfectly innocent."
Chapter 8: The Cherry Blossom Party, Part 1
When Sensei tells her that he received a postcard from Ms. Ishino, the art teacher from their old school, Tsukiko is suddenly apprehensive. But it's an invitation to a cherry blossom party at the school and Sensei asks her to go with him. She ends up speaking to another classmate during the get together [essentially ignoring Sensei in sort of a day-long shit test]. The classmate got divorced after a few years of marriage; while talking to him she sees Sensei talking to Ms. Ishino; she hears Sensei call for Tsukiko, but she ignores him. The reader gets the impression that she's either jealous or she's playing games like a high school girl; she leaves the party to go out for a drink with the classmate.
Chapter 9: The Cherry Blossom Party, Part 2
Tsukiko and the classmate have dinner, she forces the mental image of Sensei out of her mind; later Tsuikio and the classmate walk around together, and he subtly attempts to make a move on her. The reader hears from Tsukiko a rather frustrating denial of her own agency here: "How on Earth did I find myself in this situation. Where could Sensei have gone off to?"
Chapter 10: Lucky Chance
Tsukiko sees Sensei a couple of times in the weeks after the cherry blossom party, but their timing is all off: she'd see him as she was leaving the bar/restaurant and he was entering for example. In the bar, the owner, Satoru, asks her, "Do you miss having your dates with Sensei?" "We never had any dates," she answers. Then another client in the restaurant says to the owner, "The last time I saw him here he was with a beautiful lady." Later Tsukiko sees Sensei and she tells him she has a date; he asks what sort of man he is... and then urgently says "Let's go to the pachinko parlor." Sensei is extremely lucky and wins. This chapter is a metaphor for the fact that Sensei shows up in her life at the right time, in this case he preempts her going on a date with another man. Also Tsukiko and Sensei sort of indirectly talk out what happened at the party. They go to Satoru's bar together.
Chapter 11: Spring Thunder
Kojima, the classmate she met at the cherry blossom party, invites her to go on a trip with him. Also musings from the Tsukiko's character on how she hasn't grown up, how she's become more childlike the older she's gotten. A scene here where she's having a meal with Sensei, drinking too much, and wanting to tell him about the trip that Kojima invited her to go on. She wakes up at Sensei's apartment. She's babbling about going somewhere with Sensei: "I myself could only half follow what I was babbling on about. Although the truth was that I fully understood, my head seem to be pretending I was only half-aware of my own words." She tells Sensei she loves him. "Sensei just stared at me with astonishment."
Chapter 12: The Island, Part 1
Sensei asks her to come with him on a trip: "If you're busy, Tsukiko, I will go on my own." "I'll come, I'll come, I replied hurriedly." She goes on this trip with Sensei instead of traveling with Kojima.
"I could not imagine what Sensei had in mind when he invited me on this trip. His face had betrayed nothing and I agreed to go along with him, and on the train he had been exactly the same Sensei as always."
Once on the island they go for a hike; she's out of shape and can't keep up, she's wearing the wrong footwear, etc. They continue walking and arrive to a cemetery; Sensei prays at a gravestone which turns out to be his wife's grave. She died on this island, she had been struck by a car; she had been living a bohemian life with a variety of lovers. Tsukiko becomes jealous of Sensei's dead wife, she becomes angry at Sensei [again, she's a child, she's behaving incontinently here]. She rushes back to the inn in anger, but then when she arrives she's forgotten her anger and longs for Sensei to come back [again, childlike].
Chapter 13: The Island, Part 2
Sensei follows a few minutes behind; they have dinner, she drinks too much and even falls down after they get up from the table. Then as they walk back to their separate rooms he says to her to take a hot bath at the guest house and then after that he says "once you've taken the waters, if the night is still long, come to my room." "What? What do you mean by that?" "I don't mean anything by that." She ruminates on what it all means and she says to herself repeatedly, "Don't get your hopes up, don't get your hopes up." She goes to his room, they have a beer, they talk very indirectly about nothing, basically, and then he says, "Perhaps it's time to go to sleep," and she leaves. Somehow there was a possible moment for them here, but it slips away from them both.
This chapter has quite a lot of tension, although it's hard to say exactly why, and it's even harder to see how the author creates it. [The reader also really wants to take these two characters and clap their heads together and yell at them to just sleep together for Christ's sake!] Tsukiko goes back to her room and muses on what it would be like to be touched by Sensei, and then she goes back to his room; he's writing poetry. They begin writing poetry together and she becomes furious that he's not able to perceive her desperate state of wanting him. It's also 2:00 in the morning, and so they both kind of fall asleep next to each other. The next morning she wakes suddenly and then runs back to her old room and pulls the covers over her head--and then she runs back to his room and Sensei is waiting for her, and she dives under into his covers, buries her face in his chest, and then he begins touching her, and then they both fall asleep: she doesn't want to but they both fall asleep.
Chapter 14: The Tidal Flat--Dream
The scene here is a dream sequence where Tsukiko is in the old restaurant, Satoru's restaurant, she hasn't seen Sensei for a long time; she goes into the bathroom and when she comes back out he's there ordering. Then there's scene where they're looking at the horizon at the sea and there are people digging out clams at the tidal flat; Sensei is smoking; she holds a her large to-go cup that was full of sake, but it's empty; but then suddenly it's full again and she drinks the whole thing in one swallow without feeling the least bit drunk. Sensei then disappears, and glasses of sake keep reappearing, springing into her hand, she keeps drinking them. Then Sensei reappears. The dream becomes even more surreal as Sensei does a headstand and they converse about shellfish; then Tsukiko, in her dream, relates a story that she could never possibly know about his wife: how she was very good at magic, and also that one time Sensei saw a woman who looked like his wife, dressed up in a gaudy performance dress; she was with a man in a flashy suit; when he asked the woman if she was his wife, she shushes him; she puts a pigeon on his shoulder and then places a rabbit on his other shoulder, and then she pulls a monkey out from beneath her skirt and puts it on Sensei's back. Sensei puts the pigeon and the rabbit back down on the ground, but he couldn't get that monkey off of his back, and the couple walks away while he was still dealing with the monkey. [What a freaking weird dream. It's as if Sensei is occupying her mind, and even Sensei's own unresolved angst about his past is somehow occupying her mind.] Finally, still in the dream, there's a closing scene with Sensei's wife and son, where his wife pretended that their dog had been reincarnated as her, to the point of even barking like the dog; this angered their son so much that he rarely visited her thereafter.
Chapter 15: The Cricket
Tsukiko recalls certain quotes from her aunt: "It grows because you plant it," and "If love isn't true it's better to let it wither on the vine," and so she decides to avoid Sensei for a long time. "Up until now, I thought I had enjoyed my life alone, somehow." She attempts to contemplate her life but then she gets sleepy and falls asleep. [This is kind of a metaphor for her total existence, as harsh as this sounds, she's utterly non-volitional, utterly rudderless; she needs someone to help guide her.] She doesn't even comprehend why she's avoiding Sensei. She shows up at Satoru's bar, and there's a cricket chirping somewhere on the floor; Satoru tells her that Sensei has had a bad cold with a bad cough and he hasn't seen him in a week. "'I wonder if he's all right.' Satoru glanced at me." Tsukiko goes to visit him after pacing in front of his gate for ten minutes. When he sees her, he says "A lady doesn't go visit a man in the middle of the night." "He was the same old Sensei. The moment I looked him in the eye, my knees went weak." They have tea and she leaves. She pretends to speak to him as she walks home alone.
Chapter 16: In the Park
Sensei asks her on a date to a museum with a calligraphy exhibit, Tsukiko is very emotional and unbelievably nervous as they're walking together afterwards. "I was about a thousand times more nervous than the first time I had gone on a date with a boy." Sensei describes himself as a shilly-shallier, he tells Tsukiko that he didn't have the courage to take an important step with her; he then asks her if she would be satisfied if he didn't live a long time, and then he formally asks her if she would consider a relationship with him. "Would you consider a relationship with me, based on a premise of love?" They're both very embarrassed, she's embarrassed about being emotional, he's embarrassed about being seen publicly showing affection in a public park.
Chapter 17: The Briefcase
The two of them have settled into a relationship now; Tsukiko even convinces him to get a mobile phone--he doesn't want to get but he's willing to do it for her. She is concerned that they haven't yet slept together and he brings up the subject. "However, I don't have any confidence that I'm capable of it. If I were to try when I was feeling insecure, and then if I couldn't do it, my confidence would be even more diminished. And that is such a formidable outcome that it prevents me from even trying." They go to Disneyland, and then they actually do sleep together. And then three years after they began their relationship, and five years after they encountered each other as adults, he passes away. She keeps his briefcase; his son comes to see her and thanks her for being kind to his dad, bowing deeply. She talks to him and practices some of the poems Sensei taught her. "Those nights, I open Sensei's briefcase and peer inside. The blank empty space unfolds, containing nothing within. It holds nothing more than an expanse of desolate absence."