Strange Weather in Tokyo

Tsukiko, a thirty-seven-year-old office worker living alone, reconnects by chance with her former high school Japanese teacher, Mr. Harutsuna Matsumoto, at a crowded bar near the train station. They sit side by side and order nearly identical dishes. Sensei, as she comes to call him, recognizes her by name, though she cannot recall his. She begins using "Sensei," the Japanese honorific for teacher, to hide this gap, and the name sticks. Despite a thirty-plus-year age difference, they share similar tastes and temperaments and fall into a comfortable pattern of drinking together at the bar run by a man named Satoru. They never plan their meetings but encounter each other by chance, each ordering, pouring, and paying separately.

On visits to Sensei's home, Tsukiko discovers a cluttered tatami room, a traditional space with straw-mat flooring, filled with keepsakes he cannot discard: ceramic railway teapots from past travels and bags of dead batteries labeled with the appliances they once powered. Sensei tests the batteries with a voltage meter, and the needle occasionally quivers. He remarks softly that "they will all die out eventually" (8), and they sit together gazing at the moon.

Their first planned daytime outing is a visit to a monthly market, where they browse stalls and eat bento lunches. Sensei purchases two chicks, explaining that one would be lonely on its own. At the bar afterward, he accepts Tsukiko's pouring his beer for the first time, a small but significant shift in their dynamic.

A radio broadcast of a baseball game fractures their equilibrium. Sensei is a devoted Giants fan; Tsukiko despises the team. When the Giants win, Sensei gloats and pours his saké into her cup, and she curses and spills the drink. For about a month, they frequent the same bar but pretend to be strangers. On a work trip to Kappabashi, a wholesale kitchenware district, Tsukiko buys him a small grater, seized by unexpected longing. They reconcile when Sensei quietly invites her to sit beside him, and he accepts the grater with a haiku by the renowned poet Basho about grated yam soup.

Satoru invites them on his annual mushroom-hunting trip to the mountains of Tochigi. Over mushroom soup and saké, Sensei reveals that his wife did not die, as Tsukiko had assumed, but ran away about fifteen years earlier. He recounts a family hike during which his wife deliberately ate a poisonous Big Laughing Gym mushroom, triggering hours of involuntary laughter. He reflects that despite thinking they complemented each other, he did not fit his wife very well. When Tsukiko asks if he still loves her, he replies that she remains "an immeasurable presence" in his life (54).

During the New Year's holiday, Tsukiko visits her mother, and the two struggle to make conversation. Back at her apartment, she spirals into loneliness and memories of a past boyfriend lost through mutual inaction. She bursts into tears and walks aimlessly through the cold streets. Sensei appears, also out walking, and they find a bar open on the holiday. He pats her on the head, a gentle gesture she notices he has begun doing from time to time.

At a restaurant serving oden, a type of Japanese simmered stew, a drunk young man harasses them about their age difference. Sensei maintains composure and, while the man sleeps it off, steals his dangling earring, citing a story by the author Hyakken Uchida about stealing from a boor.

Sensei invites Tsukiko to a cherry-blossom-viewing party organized by their old school's teachers. He gravitates toward Ms. Ishino, the popular art teacher, while Tsukiko sits alone until Takashi Kojima, a recently divorced former classmate, finds her. Irritated by Sensei's attention to Ms. Ishino, Tsukiko slips away with Kojima to a basement bar. On the moonlit embankment afterward, Kojima kisses her and confesses he has liked her since high school. She tells him it is not going to happen. In the taxi home, she calls out Sensei's name, her voice swallowed by the engine noise.

Tsukiko begins seeing Kojima casually but remains unsettled. Running into Sensei in a shopping district, she mentions she has a date the next day. With unusual gravity, Sensei leads her to a pachinko parlor, a pinball-like gambling arcade, wins a jackpot, and gives her the chocolate from his winnings. They walk to Satoru's bar under a shared umbrella.

Kojima invites Tsukiko on an overnight trip to a countryside inn. She hedges. At Satoru's bar, she drinks heavily, ends up at Sensei's house, and blurts out, "Sensei, I love you!" (109). A thunderstorm erupts. Tsukiko, genuinely terrified of thunder, clings to him. Sensei laughs and draws her close, holding her across his knees, but does not respond to her confession. Her words are lost in the thunder and his laughter.

Sometime later, Sensei invites Tsukiko to a small island. He leads her to a hilltop cemetery, where he prays before a moss-covered gravestone belonging to his wife, Sumiyo, who died after being struck by a car. He confesses that he still dwells on her. Tsukiko, hurt and furious, storms off, but her anger dissolves into a plea for him to return. That evening, they share an elaborate seafood dinner. Later, she finds Sensei composing haiku in his room, and they write poetry together past two in the morning. Exhausted, she falls asleep on his futon, panics and flees, then returns. Sensei makes room for her, kisses her hair, and caresses her face until she falls asleep in his arms.

After the trip, a dreamlike episode unfolds in which Tsukiko and Sensei appear on a tidal flat Sensei calls "a borderline," where Tsukiko experiences vivid memories of Sumiyo's eccentric life. The boundary between dream and waking blurs entirely.

Tsukiko then deliberately avoids Sensei for the summer, hoping her feelings will wither. She sees Kojima but remains emotionally distant. After two months, she returns to Satoru's bar and learns Sensei has had a bad cough. She rushes to his house late at night and finds him recovered, wearing an I ♥ NY T-shirt from his grandson, his manner unchanged. Walking home, she resolves to stop hoping for anything beyond friendship.

Then Sensei telephones for the first time and proposes a "date," using the English word. They visit a calligraphy exhibition. On a park bench at dusk, he draws her into his arms and asks, "Would you consider a relationship with me, based on a premise of love?" (164). Tsukiko, crying into his jacket, reminds him she has been in love with him all along.

They begin what Sensei calls their "official relationship." They visit the aquarium and Disneyland, where Sensei sheds tears during the evening parade. He confesses anxiety about physical intimacy after so many years alone. One evening, he calls from his mobile phone to tell her she is "such a lovely girl" (174), then hangs up. When she rushes to his house, they share their first passionate embrace, become physically intimate for the first time, and fall asleep beside each other.

The narrative jumps forward: Sensei has died. Their entire relationship spanned about five years. Sensei's son thanks Tsukiko for her kindness. She weeps when she hears Sensei's given name, Harutsuna, spoken aloud. Tsukiko now keeps his briefcase beside her dressing table. She reads poetry by Seihaku Irako aloud and makes yudofu, a simple simmered tofu dish, the way Sensei taught her. Sometimes when she calls out "Sensei," she imagines his voice replying: "Surely we shall see each other one day" (177). She opens his briefcase and peers inside, finding only "an expanse of desolate absence" (177).