LITMIR.BIZ

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Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, “Sensei” in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him “Sensei” (“Teacher”). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship–traced by Kawakami’s gentle hints at the changing seasons–develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to an enjoyable sense of companionship, and finally into a deeply sentimental love affair.As Tsukiko and Sensei grow to know and love one another, time’s passing comes across through the seasons and the food and beverages they consume together. From warm sake to chilled beer, from the buds on the trees to the blooming of the cherry blossoms, the reader is enveloped by a keen sense of pathos and both characters’ keen loneliness.

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This is a reissue of a poetic, compact novel by celebrated Japanese author, Hiromi Kawakami (the original 2012 Counterpoint edition was titled The Briefcase (9781582435992); Strange Weather in Tokyo is the title of the wildly successful UK edition (Granta) Strange Weather in Tokyo was Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014 and won the Tanizaki Prize in 2001 This reissue will coincide with Europa's publication of Kawakami's The Nakano Thrift Shop (9781609453992, June 2017) and Counterpoint's re-release of Manazuru , another lauded Kawakami novel (9781640090187 August 2017) «[In Japan] we have something called 'palm-of-the-hand stories,' brief and strangely evocative pieces of fiction so short they might fit in your palm…conjuring an underlying, unseen world that lies beyond with just a brief description or a few words.» —Hiromi Kawakami The two rereleased novels complement each other: both are concise, poetic meditations on the cyclic patterns of loneliness and love–one protagonist is in the city, the other is on the seaside "Each chapter of the book is like a haiku, incorporating season references to the moon, mushroom picking and cherry blossoms…I cannot recommend Strange Weather in Tokyo enough, which is a testament to the translator who has skillfully retained the poetry and beauty of the original." —The Japan Society

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Twelve years have passed since Kei’s husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her three-year-old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man—the antithesis of Rei—has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find something.Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation on memory—a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members. Both startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future.

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Kawakami is an author known and reviewed around the world Manazuru received great praise when Counterpoint released it in 2010; the book already has reviews by Booklist , the Paris Review Daily , the Independent , and Publishers Weekly . This is a reissue of a quiet, beloved novel by celebrated Japanese author, Hiromi Kawakami (the original 2012 Counterpoint edition was titled The Briefcase , 9781582435992) This reissue will coincide with Europa's publication of Kawakami's The Nakano Thrift Shop (9781609453992, June 2017) and Counterpoint's re-release of Strange Weather in Tokyo , another lauded Kawakami novel (9781640090163, August 2017) «[In Japan] we have something called 'palm-of-the-hand stories,' brief and strangely evocative pieces of fiction so short they might fit in your palm…conjuring an underlying, unseen world that lies beyond with just a brief description or a few words.» —Hiromi Kawakami The two re-released novels complement each other: both are concise, poetic meditations on the cyclic patterns of loneliness and love—one protagonist is in the city, the other is on the seaside Translator Michael Emmerich was a Costen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University

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