Strange Weather in Tokyo

by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Allison Markin Powell

Strange Weather in Tokyo is not a part of a trilogy, but I de facto’d it into one by picking up three Japanese novels at the same time. I thought I was grabbing all locked-room mysteries. The first one I read convinced me my baseless assumptions were correct: The Honjin Murders was a mystery novel, and when I moved on to Before The Coffee Gets Cold, I could half-convince myself that it was mystery-novel adjacent—it had rules to work around, surprising twists, gentle revelations. Strange Weather in Tokyo is so much not a mystery that it overwrote my pretend narrative about Before The Coffee and made me realize I was forcing the fact pattern to fit into my pretend mystery-novel-trilogy narrative.

Strange Weather was my favorite of three rather dissimilar books: figuring out why I liked it so much brought me back to reviewing, something I have skipped a lot during 2021, for reasons both personal and pandemical. 2021 is my ten-year mark for writing book reviews for fun, but my dearth of creative output has allowed me space to think about what—and who—I am writing for in the first place.

So let’s take a quick trip back to 2011. A blissful fall season, when I decided I wanted to review every book I read to practice my writing, because I liked writing. And I did not like much else in 2011.

Nothing in 2011 was flattering.

I was living in Manhattan’s Upper East Side—in 2011, it was awash in the fresh scent of juice bars, riddled with the then-new trend of to-go chopped salad restaurants, and lousy with knock-off Equinox clones—somehow scraping together rent each month. At the time my book reviewing began, I was working at Columbia Business School in a job that paid me less than my commute plus any sort of lunch (big fan of The Mill). Sometimes I walked, just to save the $2.25 subway fare. It was precisely this financial precarity that turned me back into a library guy, and I was and still am so lucky that the NYPL was there to welcome me, its wayward son, back into its stacks. Free books, what a concept.

And so, as any underemployed and adrift flâneur might, I started tossing some words on the internet. And when people responded, or clicked the like button, or emailed me, or even criticized what I wrote, I felt preeetty preeetty good. So I kept doing it. Even when I got busy. Even when I shifted into full-time work that paid monies. Even when I moved across the country. Even when I got my face busted by muggers. Even when I first became a dad. Even—and this was harder—when I didn’t have much to say.

What really sunk me were picking up two college courses during the lockdown that demanded a lot of writing: similar writing to, say, voluntary book reviews. It torched my spirit. I couldn’t continue. And spare time away from my family was spent on homework, and any personal writing felt like indulgence. Like any routine, once it is broken it can be hard to get back into it. So Honjin Murders slide away. Ditto, Before The Coffee. And you know what? I felt great. It was nice to read some books and the finish them and then read some more books. I still took notes, but they didn’t go anywhere. I still had some ideas, but they never got fleshed out. I’m four books further in Wheel of Time than my reviews would have you believe. And the rest of my time, which has dwindled as my daughter has grown, went to the same thing as every parent of an under-five-year-old: holding it together.

Right, so, cue this this book called Strange Weather in Tokyo. There’s a woman who is just sort of faffing about, working a job and existing in the normal—but not literary—sense. If she was just a person you knew, she’d be fine: a job, a home, stuff to eat, hobbies, etc etc. But if you’re reading about her, well, it seems a little flat. Something’s gotta happen, right?

The passage of time had been evenly distributed for Kojima, and both his body and mind had developed proportionately.

I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper grown-up. I had been very much the adult when I was elementary school. But as I continued on through junior high school, on the contrary, I became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn’t able to ally myself with time.

Because she describes herself as without adult proclivities, you start to see her childlike nature. As you are prompted to, such a good little reader you are, following the narrator and believing what she says. As the story moves forward and the more you see her just exist in this normal-not-amazing way, the more you see that her childlike approach is not childish, but free. She is untethered from the weight of the world because she is whole. Complete. Herself. Not defined by job, spouse, progeny, or social impact. She just is.

This freedom from social expectation is why I liked Strange Weather so much. I began reviewing when everything else in my life was bad, and it brought me some level of joy. I didn’t write for clicks or likes or emails from authors but to create something for myself, an outlet to let me be me. I wanted to share my own thoughts—which doesn’t mean I think they are valuable per se, but I do think are valuable and worthwhile to anyone that chooses to engage with them—and I still do. I want to be heard on my own terms, so I will write about this book in relation to the two others I mistakenly connected to it, even though that doesn’t fit the algorithm’s formatting for “one book, one review.”

“Sensei,” I called out through the front door, but of course there was no reply. How could he reply if he had no voice left to call out with?

“Sensei,” I said several more times, but my voice was swallowed up by the night’s darkness. That’s why I was knocking on the door.

I heard footsteps in the hall.'

“Who is it?” a voice asked, hoarsely.

“It’s me.”

“‘It’s me’ is not an appropriate response, Tsukiko.”

This site is going to go back to the “it’s me” of writing. Sorry, algorithms.