Revisiting the Great Hiromi Kawakami...Again

Sensei no Kaban by Hiromi Kawakami

Hi. It's Yuki writing, and it's April 2025. The great Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami is shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for her astounding novel Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda. I am thrilled for Kawakami to be receiving this recognition outside of Japan, though she is hardly an unknown.

In Japan, she is a living literary legend, publishing more books over the course of thirty years than can be accurately counted (I tried). I've read many of her titles but know I'm nowhere close to reaching even half, and as she continues to write new books, many of them epic-length, I know that I will never catch up in real time. Which is the most wonderful thing about living in the same world as a literary hero.

Over the years, I realize I've written more than a few words about Hiromi Kawakami, all over on Instagram, which we have questions about these days. The big one being: will it exist next year?

So I thought this would be a nice time to gather my thoughts up from the past few years and rewrite, rearrange, rethink them here on this site. These words will be here for you to come back to, after you've read a Kawakami title, for example. Like an ongoing book club. (I hope you share your thoughts somewhere too!)

Back in August 2020, I was locked down in Los Angeles with my parents, anxiously awaiting 'news' along with the rest of the world, though what news I was waiting for, I still haven't a clue. Every August, many readers and literary-minded folks celebrate Women in Translation month, a groundbreaking initiative-turned-movement founded by Meytal Radzinski, and I did a dive into the Hiromi Kawakami titles that were translated into English at the time. (More have come since.)

What kicked off the deep-dive was Kawakami's slim novel Parade, which has been translated into English by Allison Markin Powell.

Parade by Hiromi Kawakami (Translated by Allison Markin Powell)

Here's what I wrote in August 2020:

I read Hiromi Kawakami’s Parade this week and was getting set to write about it, but as it’s a spin-off of the Kawakami masterpiece Sensei no Kaban, known as Strange Weather in Tokyo in English, and features the same two protagonists, I felt a sudden and absolute necessity to read Sensei no Kaban again. So first thing in the morning and with masks on, my mom and I went to a used Japanese bookstore in LA called Book Off (it’s a huge chain in Japan and was incredibly well-stocked here, I was so impressed), and I found a used paperback of Sensei! In and out in two minutes, I walked out holding another copy of the novel, though I have both the Japanese and English copies on my bookshelf in Tokyo.

‘Sensei no Kaban’ translates to ’Teacher’s Briefcase’, and I understand why the title was changed in English. Teacher’s Briefcase doesn’t offer any clues as to how intimate, delicate, and moving the novel is, making it difficult to explain why I’m a bit of a weepy mess right now.

If Banana Yoshimoto’s novels rarely feel like they are set in a specific city in Japan (giving them their universal feel), Hiromi Kawakami’s novels are very particular about their Japanese settings, character traits, conversations. I can’t imagine how difficult this must have been to translate into English, done so effectively by Allison.

This is a novel entirely about nuance - of age, admiration, love, and finally, of memory. The story itself is quite different from what the English cover might suggest, closer to what the Japanese cover implies, which is a lot of quiet longing and contemplation. The story lies in what is left unsaid.

Unspoken, on both the part of 37-year-old Tsukiko and her former high school teacher, with whom she meets up by chance at a local izakaya where she often goes for a drink (or five) after work, alone. She is fine living alone, Tsukiko is, she can take care of herself. But as she and her former teacher strike up a conversation, once, twice, three times at the izakaya, with him never breaking his formal conversation style, and her trying to figure out his truth, she starts to feel an emotion she’s never felt before - a deep kind of yearning. For him? For a future? For connection?

I’ve read this novel a few times in Japanese, but never have I felt it more potently, maybe because of all this solitude and longing we’ve experienced the past several months.

August 2020

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami (Translated by Allison Markin Powell)

***

It's now 2025, and I'm delighted to find that I wouldn't change a thing I wrote five years ago about the great novel or author.

No matter the results of this year's International Booker Prize, Hiromi Kawakami's status in Japanese literary scene is cemented, and it is a joy to be able to pick up any of her books now, including Sensei no Kaban, published in 2001, and its English counterpart, published in 2017, and experience the same rush of emotions I felt the first time, even if I've now bounded right past the protagonist's age, made it through a global pandemic, live now in a state of perpetual horror, feel like a different person from five years ago.

More coming soon. Thanks for finding this post.