Strange Weather in Tokyo

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami is the novel that first brought this celebrated Japanese writer to international attention — a quiet, tender, and deeply affecting story about an unexpected friendship between a thirty-something woman and her former high school teacher, which gradually becomes something more. Tsukiko meets Sensei in a bar and they begin an irregular pattern of encounters — drinking sake, eating good food, walking in parks — that slowly reveals itself to be a love story unlike any other. Kawakami’s prose, beautifully translated by Allison Markin Powell, has a quality of extreme attention to the small and sensory that gives the novel its distinctive quality: it is a book you inhabit rather than read. Published by Portobello Books, this is one of the most beautiful and quietly devastating love stories in contemporary fiction.