Rainy season

Rainy season is the weather-bound time Lucy associates most strongly with her relationship with Teiji. In her recollection, rain is not simply the backdrop to their intimacy: it gives their shared nights a sound, a vocabulary, and a recurring shape. Later, that same weather returns without restoring the closeness it once accompanied, making the season a measure of both memory’s force and its unreliability.

A Season Made by Memory

Lucy says that the nights with Teiji have become jumbled in her mind, yet the time they spent together “always seems to be the rainy season.” That qualification matters: the season is presented as the pattern her recollection imposes, not as a precise calendar record. Repeated rain gathers separate evenings into one remembered atmosphere, even as Lucy acknowledges that she may be confusing them.

The association reaches back to their first encounter in Shinjuku. After Mrs. Yamamoto’s string quartet had disbanded, Lucy wandered central Tokyo on a Sunday evening in steady rain. Outside the Keio Plaza Hotel, she saw Teiji photographing a puddle while rain ran over his face. She was drawn to the scene and stepped into the reflected image; the camera caught her feet before Teiji looked up. The encounter’s wet pavement and reflections anticipate the rainy nights that later become central to Lucy’s account of their life together.

Rain as Shared Practice

Rain becomes something Lucy and Teiji deliberately seek out. They spend weekends together, but Lucy remembers their favorite outings as warm-night walks in the rain. Teiji teaches her words for different kinds of rainfall: potsu potsu for fine, spitting rain and zaa zaa for a downpour. Their intimacy includes this shared attention to distinctions that ordinary dictionaries may not capture; weather becomes something they can name together.

In one remembered scene, Teiji takes Lucy outdoors because it is raining. They splash through puddles, following wet streets from the main highway to a smaller road, where individual drops can be heard landing on leaves, windowsills, and flower petals. They race to a railway bridge and wait beneath the Yamanote Line for a train. As it passes overhead, they kiss; the vibration and noise of the train frame their physical closeness. The rain does not interrupt their meeting but makes the streets, their bodies, and the passing train part of its setting.

Sound, Recurrence, and Uncertainty

The season’s remembered soundscape persists beyond the scenes of romance. Lucy recalls the rhythm of rainfall through potsu potsu, but other recurring sounds carry less certain meanings. During an earthquake, she and Lily hear what Lucy calls the Earthquake bird. Lucy says Teiji thought it might be an old night bird knocked from its perch by the tremor; the sound also suggests, to Lily, a distant boot striking a tin can. Lucy has noticed that it seems to begin just before the ground moves, but cannot decide whether it is a warning, a symptom, or a misperception. Her uncertainty resembles her account of the rainy nights: sensation remains vivid even when its exact place in time cannot be fixed.

At a later neighborhood earthquake drill, Lucy is still nervous of tremors. The nearby trains shake the buildings, making it easier to miss movements that begin beneath the earth. This present-day mixture of rumble and uncertainty sits alongside the rain memories, in which sound once accompanied shared attention and physical closeness. The recurring sounds do not explain what is happening; they sharpen Lucy’s awareness that a familiar sensation can return under changed conditions.

After the Relationship

After the separation, Lucy’s movement through Tokyo gives remembered places a different charge. She walks through the night from Gotanda along the Yamanote Line, passing places associated with earlier parts of her life and eventually reaching Shinjuku, near where she first saw Teiji. She thinks of Sachi and wonders whether Teiji moved from one woman to another as if they were stations along a track. By morning Lucy has completed a marathon-distance circuit of the city. The circular route brings her back to her starting point, but not to the intimacy that the rainy-season memories preserve.

Rain eventually returns as an unsettling presence rather than a shared invitation. At Mrs. Katoh’s home, a camera clicks in the surrounding trees; Lucy looks for Teiji but sees only trees and bushes. Small drops begin to fall, potsu potsu, then grow heavier. She imagines that Teiji is waiting outside and hopes the warmth of the house and her friends will keep her indoors. The rain thus carries the past into the present without resolving it: it recalls the nights when Lucy and Teiji sought one another, while accompanying her fear that the relationship’s absence may not be final.