20 Books of Summer, 12–13: Strange Weather in Tokyo (#WITMonth) & Mitz
Two terrific novellas I’m belatedly writing up today, one my first selection for Women in Translation month and the other a contribution to Virago’s “Summer of Sigrid.” Both: 
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami (2001; 2012)
[Translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell]
Tsukiko is a lonely barfly in her late thirties when she bumps into her secondary school Japanese teacher, Harutsuna Matsumoto, again. She calls him simply “Sensei,” and they start meeting up for low-key adventures: sharing tofu and saké at Satoru’s bar, marking annual holidays, and leaving the city to forage for mushrooms and visit his late wife’s island grave. Sensei quotes poetry and, ever the teacher, gently corrects his former pupil’s language. Tsukiko is an impassive young woman who never seemed to grow up (“I … still might not be considered a proper adult. … I just wasn’t able to ally myself with time”) and is prone to drinking too much, but finally starts to get a grip on her emotions thanks to this new connection.
Each chapter is discrete, building into a linked short story collection. The erratic (non)use of speech marks somehow didn’t bother me as it seems to suit Tsukiko’s slight disorientation. Kawakami infuses the book with attention to the seasons’ changes and everyday sensual pleasures like food. A drunk at the bar speaks for us readers when he asks the main characters, “You two, just what are you?” The nature of their bond is hard to pin down. Tsukiko is also courted by Kojima, a more age-appropriate boyfriend, but she feels nothing for him. Instead, a May–December relationship unfolds like cherry blossom, ever so gradually, from friendship into something deeper. Powell manages to fit some wordplay into her translation, as in this gently erotic passage:
At some point, sitting beside Sensei, I began to notice the heat that radiated from his body. Through his starched shirt, there came a sense of Sensei. A feeling of nostalgia. This sense of Sensei retained the shape of him. It was dignified, yet tender, like Sensei.
From the title and cover image, I might have expected the magic realism so common to Japanese literature, but this is something different: a lovely, subtle romance. It’s a reminder that it doesn’t have to be torrid passion to be true love. “Even a chance meeting is the result of a karmic connection,” as Sensei quotes. Susan (A life in books), whose review is excerpted in my paperback copy, is quite right. Kawakami was a great new discovery and I’ve got my eye on several more of her books: The Nakano Thrift Shop from the library and Record of a Night Too Brief and Far from Everywhere (forthcoming in February) on my e-reader. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez (1998)
What a fun little book from Nunez’s back catalogue! On the one hand, a fictional mini-biography of the Woolfs by way of their pet marmoset might seem like a random choice of topic; on the other hand, you can see the seeds of her future autofiction in which human–animal connection is a starting point for wide-ranging meditations on life and death (a dog in The Friend; a parrot in The Vulnerables; and even, to a lesser extent, the cat in What Are You Going Through).
Mitz is a small monkey who induces strong, conflicting reactions: “You looked at her and thought, How grotesque. And the very next instant, How adorable. And then, How grotesque, again.” She takes a shine to Leonard on a visit the Woolfs pay to their friends the Rothschilds in 1934, and before long they’ve offered to take Mitz home to share their London and Sussex life, along with Pinka and Sally, the spaniels they had in succession. Mitz’s favourite spot thereafter was sat on Leonard’s shoulders, or napping on his feet. She accompanied the couple on their travels, too, so distracting people in Germany that Virginia would write in a letter that “the marmoset saved us from Hitler” (Leonard was Jewish). Visitors were less enamoured, thinking Mitz dirty and bad-tempered.
In any case, the creature was a lucky accessory to genius, and Nunez makes her our eyewitness to the composition of works such as Roger Fry and The Years:
From a distance, then, Mitz observed Virginia. And she saw how this mysterious activity that could bring such a flush to Virginia’s cheek could also have quite the opposite effect: Virginia was as white as her own writing paper. She scribbled and slashed; she muttered and she groaned and she cursed. She jumped up from the chair and wandered in circles about the room.
How much Mitz understands of ageing, death, and conflict, can never be known. These were tumultuous pre-war years, during which Virginia lost a nephew and fascism loomed large. Nunez sets personal cataclysms against international ones, imagining Mitz’s journey from a Brazilian forest, via a hellish ship, to the London junk shop where she was made to sit in a draughty window to drum up business. That she spent her last five years so loved and cosseted was a stroke of good fortune. Her death ends up feeling like a more general omen, as in the book’s final line: “It was Christmas Day, the last year of peace.”
I was reminded of the complications of keeping an exotic pet in My Animals and Other Family by Julia Blackburn, in which she buys Congo the bushbaby from Harrods (and there is also a family spaniel). As part of the backmatter of this reissue, a thank-you letter from Nigel Nicolson to Nunez and a 2019 afterword by Peter Cameron note the undeniable inspiration of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a playful short biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel (for whom Pinka, a gift from Vita Sackville-West, was a model). I fancied rereading Flush so have picked that up as one of my substitute Books of Summer and am enjoying discovering the connections between it and Mitz. More anon.
With thanks to Virago for the free copy for review, one of several matching reissues they sent me as part of their “Summer of Sigrid.”
Four (Almost) One-Sitting Novellas by Blackburn, Murakami, Porter & School of Life (#NovNov25)
I never believe people who say they read 300-page novels in a sitting. How is that possible?! I’m a pretty slow reader, I like to bounce between books rather than read one exclusively, and I often have a hot drink to hand beside my book stack, so I’d need a bathroom break or two. I also have a young cat who doesn’t give me much peace. But 100 pages or thereabouts? I at least have a fighting chance of finishing a novella in one go. Although I haven’t yet achieved a one-sitting read this month, it’s always the goal: to carve out the time and be engrossed such that you just can’t put a book down. I’ll see if I can manage it before November is over.
A couple of longish car rides last weekend gave me the time to read most of three of these, and the next day I popped the other in my purse for a visit to my favourite local coffee shop. I polished them all off later in the week. I have a mini memoir in pets, a surreal Japanese story with illustrations, an innovative modern classic about bereavement, and a set of short essays about money and commodification.
My Animals and Other Family by Julia Blackburn; illus. Herman Makkink (2007)
In five short autobiographical essays, Blackburn traces her life with pets and other domestic animals. Guinea pigs taught her the facts of life when she was the pet monitor for her girls’ school – and taught her daughter the reality of death when they moved to the country and Galaxy sired a kingdom of outdoor guinea pigs. They also raised chickens, then adopted two orphaned fox cubs; this did not end well. There are intriguing hints of Blackburn’s childhood family dynamic, which she would later write about in the memoir The Three of Us: Her father was an alcoholic poet and her mother a painter. It was not a happy household and pets provided comfort as well as companionship. “I suppose tropical fish were my religion,” she remarks, remembering all the time she devoted to staring at the aquarium. Jason the spaniel was supposed to keep her safe on walks, but his presence didn’t deter a flasher (her parents’ and a policeman’s reactions to hearing the story are disturbingly blasé). My favourite piece was the first, “A Bushbaby from Harrods”: In the 1950s, the department store had a Zoo that sold exotic pets. Congo the bushbaby did his business all over her family’s flat but still was “the first great love of my life,” Blackburn insists. This was pleasant but won’t stay with me. (New purchase – remainder copy from Hay Cinema Bookshop, 2025) [86 pages] 
Super-Frog Saves Tokyo by Haruki Murakami; illus. Seb Agresti and Suzanne Dean (2000, 2001; this edition 2025)
[Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin]
This short story first appeared in English in GQ magazine in 2001 and was then included in Murakami’s collection after the quake, a response to the Kobe earthquake of 1995. “Katigiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment,” it opens. The six-foot amphibian knows that an earthquake will hit Tokyo in three days’ time and wants the middle-aged banker to help him avert disaster by descending into the realm below the bank and doing battle with Worm. Legend has it that the giant worm’s anger causes natural disasters. Katigiri understandably finds it difficult to believe what’s happening, so Frog earns his trust by helping him recover a troublesome loan. Whether Frog is real or not doesn’t seem to matter; either way, imagination saves the city – and Katigiri when he has a medical crisis. I couldn’t help but think of Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban (one of my NovNov reads last year). While this has been put together as an appealing standalone volume and was significantly more readable than any of Murakami’s recent novels that I’ve tried, I felt a bit cheated by the it-was-all-just-a-dream motif. (Public library) [86 pages] 
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter (2015)
A reread – I reviewed this for Shiny New Books when it first came out and can’t better what I said then. “The novel is composed of three first-person voices: Dad, Boys (sometimes singular and sometimes plural) and Crow. The father and his two young sons are adrift in mourning; the boys’ mum died in an accident in their London flat. The three narratives resemble monologues in a play, with short lines often laid out on the page more like stanzas of a poem than prose paragraphs.” What impressed me most this time was the brilliant mash-up of allusions and genres. The title: Emily Dickinson. The central figure: Ted Hughes’s Crow. The setup: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” – while he’s grieving his lost love, a man is visited by a black bird that won’t leave until it’s delivered its message. (A raven cronked overhead as I was walking to get my cappuccino.) I was less dazzled by the actual writing, though, apart from a few very strong lines about the nature of loss, e.g. “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project.” I have a feeling this would be better experienced in other media (such as audio, or the play version). I do still appreciate it as a picture of grief over time, however. Porter won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award as well as the Dylan Thomas Prize. (Secondhand – Gifted by a friend as part of a trip to Community Furniture Project, Newbury last year; I’d resold my original hardback copy – more fool me!) [114 pages]
My original rating (in 2015): 
My rating now: 
Why We Hate Cheap Things by The School of Life (2017)
I’m generally a fan of the high-brow self-help books The School of Life produces, but these six micro-essays feel like cast-offs from a larger project. The title essay explores the link between the cost of an item or experience and how much we value it – with reference to pineapples and paintings. The other essays decry the fact that money doesn’t get fairly distributed, such that craftspeople and arts graduates often struggle financially when their work and minds are exactly what we should be valuing as a society. Fair enough … but any suggestions for how to fix the situation?! I’m finding Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, which is also on a vaguely economic theme, much more engaging and profound. There’s no author listed for this volume, but as The School of Life is Alain de Botton’s brainchild, I’m guessing he had a hand. Perhaps he’s been cancelled? This raises a couple of interesting questions, but overall you’re probably better off spending the time with something more in depth. (Little Free Library) [78 pages]
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 