Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
Published 2001 · 52,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance
How hard is Strange Weather in Tokyo to read?
Strange Weather in Tokyo scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Powell's translation keeps a large body of Japanese food and drink vocabulary untranslated — the dishes are the novel's structure — alongside otherwise plain contemporary prose.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Short, simple sentences and abundant dialogue, with a light, conversational first-person voice.
- Abstraction: 44 out of 100
- Almost entirely concrete: food, weather, trains, rooms. The novel's argument about loneliness is never stated and has to be read off what the characters eat and when.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- Two characters, a bar, a year and a half. Japanese classical poetry, which Sensei quotes, is the only material demanding outside knowledge.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- Tsukiko narrates without examining herself, both characters withhold everything that matters, and Sensei's briefcase and his history are held back until a final chapter that recasts the whole relationship.
- Symbolic density: 64 out of 100
- The briefcase, the seasonal dishes, the mushrooms, the cherry blossom and the empty seat at the counter carry the emotional content the narrator will not articulate.
- Ironic distance: 54 out of 100
- A gentle comedy of two people who cannot say anything direct, with Sensei's pedantic corrections standing in for affection throughout.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The final chapter jumps forward, reveals what the briefcase contained, and closes without showing the years it skips, leaving the reader to reconstruct the relationship's whole ending from four pages.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Short seasonal chapters in loose chronological order, with one substantial time jump at the end that changes the book's register.
How Strange Weather in Tokyo is regarded
Strange Weather in Tokyo holds a literary regard score of 63 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.