The Detail I Had Left Out

The old entry for Strange Weather in Tokyo had room for meals, conversation and passing seasons. It mentioned a woman meeting her former teacher in a bar. Then it offered the book as company that would sit beside the reader gently.

It did not say that their relationship becomes a romance, or that he is thirty years older.

Those details now appear in the translation guide. Tsukiko is thirty-eight. The man she meets was her high-school teacher. In Hiromi Kawakami's novel, translated by Allison Markin Powell, their repeated encounters develop into love. The publisher's description names that relationship plainly.

The earlier paragraph had already introduced the two people. What it left indistinct was what they become to each other. Meals and conversation could have suggested several kinds of company; the invitation stayed pleasantly open while the relationship itself remained out of focus.

“Former teacher” is doing quite a lot of work here. Tsukiko is an adult when they meet again, yet the phrase carries an earlier part of their lives into the bar with them. Adding her age makes that present moment clearer. Adding the thirty-year difference gives the reader another part of the same picture.

Neither detail settles what anyone should think of the romance. One reader might find the premise intriguing. Another might prefer a different relationship at the center of a novel. Both can begin with the same description; they needn't arrive at the same choice.

There is still room for the food and the seasons. The revision hasn't turned the entry into a verdict on these two people, and it doesn't need to decide in advance how tender or awkward their connection will seem. It simply lets the relationship occupy some of the space previously given to the mood around it.

The entry is only a few paragraphs long. Now the two people at the bar have a little more room in it.