BOOK REVIEW - Strange Weather In Tokyo - Hiromi Kawakami

Having spent a good part of last year reading the late and early greats of Japanese fiction, I thought I'd see what else there was to be discovered in Japanese contemporary fiction, hidden behind the towering colossus of Haruki Murakami. Like Hiromi Kawakami's previous work Strange Weather in Tokyo has been much garlanded in Japan. It also brought her to more international notice and acclaim. Short listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2013, the Asian version of our own Man Booker Prize, it also took the Independent's short lived Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014.

Hiromi Kwawkami

• In Alison Markin Powell's sensitive translation Kawakawi's writing deceptively present itself as a continuation of that classic Japanese tradition for understated gentle elegance. Devoid of dramatic flourishes, and internal dialogue, it glides intregingly along via a sad melancholic mood and the emotional undertow of a 'will they or wont they get together' storyline. Yet it does not slavishly follow a convention or literary cliche. Its subject matter, the relationship between a retired teacher and a middle aged former pupil, set in the backstreet bars and streets of Tokyo is decidedly modern, urban and off kilter.

There is no longer a background of sentimental yearning for a lost rural Japan. the crippling social conventions and formality of traditional marriage and relationship negotiations have vanished. Replaced by liberality, the alienating individuality of emotionally damaged people, socially clumsy, but with an inhibited desire for intimacy. In a city of nearly fourteen million people making meanigful connections has become more than hard.

Tsukiko is a woman in her late thirties, living a financially independent but mostly quite lonely life. Boyfriends of her own age she's found immature and uniformly disappointing. At thirty seven she's beginning to wonder if finding a meannigful relationship is nothing more than fantasy, Then she meets Sensei, a respectful term used by a pupil to address their revered teacher. She bumps into himi by accident in a bar bistro. At first they continue to meet up simply because they enjoy each others company. There is over thirty years between them so what move could they share but friendship? Gradually it becomes much more emotionally complicated than outward appearances might betray.

Tsukiko finds her feelings are developing a desire for more than platonic companionship. Sensei is prickly and paternalistic, often in an uncommunicative grump. Once he starts to open up about his wife who walked out on him years ago, an unstated intimacy emerges, both of them feel something for the other but they never openly declare what that is.

The novel proceeds on like this with little overt drama. Sensei and Tsukiko, meet, then they don't meet for months, they fall out, and then they make amends. Each time they return to their regular meetings they are drawing closer. They miss each other. Until they go on a trip together where what they really feel for each other becomes all too apparent, and they spring apart again. Little by little the novel draws you into this unconventional bumpy form of falling in love with each other. Its tender and touching as the relationship's episodic lurching from one extreme to another move you towards some sort of resolution. The novels's conclusion I found quite unexpected, and all the more devastaingly moving for that.

Strange Weather In Tokyo, never declares what it is loudly and brazenly.  It posesses a quiet ordinary and unprepossesing humanity to it, that is beguiling and utterly wonderful.