An award-winning novel from one of Japan's most exciting literary voices: a short, simple and touching story of an unlikely love that blossoms across generations, and between seasons
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Summary
An award-winning novel from one of Japan's most exciting literary voices: a short, simple and touching story of an unlikely love that blossoms across generations, and between seasons
Description
Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to her former high school teacher, 'Sensei', in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired and, she presumes, a widower.
After this initial encounter, the pair continue to meet occasionally to share food and drink sake, and as the seasons pass - from spring cherry blossom to autumnal mushrooms - Tsukiko and Sensei come to develop a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love.
Strange Weather in Tokyo is perfectly constructed, warmly funny and deeply moving.
Awards
Long-listed for Man Asian Literary Prize 2013 (UK)
Critic Reviews
'Enchanting, moving and funny in equal measure, this compelling love story is expertly crafted against a backdrop of modern Japanese culture... I [was] captivated... Stylish and unsentimental, a perfect love story' - Stylist
'I'm hooked... It's interesting enough to read about an aging woman drawn to an older man; when this attraction comes wrapped up in Japanese nostalgia for old fashioned inns, mushroom hunting, refined manners, and Basho, how can a person resist? I can only imagine what wizardry must have gone into Allison Markin Powell's translation' - Lorin Stein, Paris Review
'Kawakami transforms an affecting cross-generational romance into an exquisite poem of time and mutability.... Delicate and haunting' - Boyd Tonkin, Independent
'This short, quirky love story has a very distinctive, very Japanese sensibility... Allison Markin Powell's translation is clear and graceful' - Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday
About the Author
HIROMI KAWAKAMI is one of Japan's most popular contemporary novelists. She is the recipient of the Pascal Short Story Prize for New Writers, the Akutagawa Prize, the Ito Sei Literature Award, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize and the Joryu Bungaku Sho (Women Writers' Prize). Strange Weather in Tokyo won the Tanizaki prize, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and has been translated into thirteen languages.
ALLISON MARKIN POWELL is a literary translator and editor in New York City. She has translated works by Osamu Dazai, Kaho Nakayama, and Motoyuki Shibata, and was the guest editor for the first Japan issue of Words Without Borders.
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