Japan's rainy season

Japan's rainy season is a defining environmental presence in Etsuko's recollection of a summer in Nagasaki. Its end does not bring an immediate return to ordinary conditions: water, mud, and the altered ground remain in the landscape, then become part of the heat and discomfort of the months that follow.

The transition out of the rains

In June, after the rainy season, one of the first afternoons of bright sunlight finds the soaked brick and concrete around the railway bridge beginning to dry. From there Etsuko sees roofs clustered on the hillside and, beyond them, the apartment blocks where she lives. The season is registered through this change in surfaces: the rain has stopped, but its wetness still marks the setting in which she first listens to neighborhood women discuss Sachiko.

The river and Mariko

The rainfall remains more directly visible at the river, which is still high and flowing swiftly a few weeks after the rainy season. The ground falls steeply toward the water; at its foot, where Mariko stands, the mud is distinctly wetter. Etsuko's first remembered approach to the girl is thus set in terrain still shaped by recent rain, with Mariko looking up from the muddy slope without smiling. The river and its banks are not merely a backdrop to their encounter: their height, speed, and mud give the scene its physical conditions.

What the rain leaves behind

As the summer grows hotter, the wasteground outside Etsuko's apartment block becomes increasingly inhospitable. Much of the earth dries and cracks, while rainwater persists in deeper ditches and craters; insects breed across the ground, and mosquitoes become pervasive. Etsuko crosses this terrain regularly on her way to Sachiko's cottage, where insects catch in her hair and grubs and midges are visible among the cracked earth. The season's effects therefore shift from swollen water and saturated mud to heat, stagnant pools, and infestation. Remembered through these concrete changes, the rainy season gives the summer a distinct physical chronology and makes the difficult crossing part of Etsuko's lasting image of that time.