A review by sdwoodchuck
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

3.75

 Tsukiko, an office worker in her thirties, realizes that one of her former high school teachers is a regular at a bar that she frequents. After reconnecting, the two embark on a sometimes-mundane, sometimes-awkward friendship that involves such exciting activities as visiting a market, gathering mushrooms in the mountains, and regularly drinking to excess.

The above summary may seem as though I’m mocking the novel, but I actually really admire it. I mentioned in my Dragon Palace review that Kawakami is excellent at presenting subtle emotional shifts, and that prowess is on full display here in the depiction of a friendship between two people who are almost perfectly mismatched, except in their mutual loneliness. And to be sure, the ways in which these characters communicate that loneliness to the reader and to each other is where this novel is at its strongest, but outside of that, I feel that this is an extraordinarily well-written approach to a story that I only halfway care about. This becomes more apparent in the later chapters, with a change in direction that feels genuine in its strangeness, but doesn’t quite grab me, and left me feeling a little cold on the ending stretch.