A Poignant Tale of Love!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                          I wasn't so sure about "Strange Weather In Tokyo," when I began it, though it had been highly recommended to me.  I guess I was not ready for an understated story, for this tale of a thirty-eight year old former student, who reunites, and falls in love with, a school teacher she had thirty years before, who is that many years older than she, sneaks up on the reader.

                                           At first, there is so much cat-and-mouse playing here, by both characters, the reader feels the story isn't going to go anywhere.  Soon, it does, and the prose style has the hypnotic pull of a dream. Like many films of serious Japanese cinema, there is something, in the writing style, that is wonderfully otherworldly, for what is, essentially, an ordinary story.

                                           No histrionics, no "Fatal Attraction" or "Audition" tricks.  This novel hearkens back more to the Fifties film classic "Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing," and the poignancy of this novel's ending reminded me very much of that 1955 film.  I actually shed some tears, once I finished the book.

                                            I believe--but could be wrong about this--that "Strange Weather In Tokyo" is Hirami Kawakami's first novel, to be published in English, in America.  She has a strangely, poetic, and mystical style, and I would like to see where and how she takes this further.   I would love to see how she incorporates all this into a more traditional narrative.

                                               Nevertheless, darlings, something different, for those who desire class fare!!!!!!!!!!!!!!