Japan's Rainy Season

Japan's Rainy Season is the waterlogged summer setting in which Narrator (God) makes pleasure into a way of life and water into a language for the self. Nearly daily rain, familiar neighborhood floods, and a swollen Little Green Lake give the season a physical presence beyond the weather: it changes the streets, remakes the swimming place, and invites a child to imagine being as abundant and persistent as rain itself. The account is also part of a newly claimed memory. Narrator (God) says that memory begins with the pleasure brought by white chocolate, placing the rainy childhood within a remembered world that is vivid yet presented with unusual claims about what can be known firsthand.

Season and Setting

The rain arrives with a sharp rise in temperature. July marks the beginning of the rainy season, and showers fall on nearly every day. Narrator (God) spends entire days beneath the roofed part of the terrace, watching the sky send water against the earth. The spectacle becomes a contest: the child acts as referee and keeps score, judging the clouds more impressive but the earth the eventual victor. Earth wins through inertia, absorbing the assault without complaint. This imaginative match makes weather an active encounter rather than distant scenery, while the regularity of the downpours gives the season its own rhythm.

That contest has a reversal. Sometimes rain wins, and its victory is a flood. The neighborhood water level rises, but in the Kansai Mountains this is described as a yearly summer occurrence, not a catastrophe. Streets are prepared for it: storm drains are left open, and drivers proceed slowly to avoid the manholes. Traveling by car in the inundated streets feels, to the child, like moving in a boat. The flooding thus alters ordinary movement without becoming an exceptional disaster; its expected return is part of the local summer order.

Little Green Lake and Daily Immersion

The water also changes the landscape of childhood. Little Green Lake nearly doubles in size and spills over the azalea bushes. At times there is no longer space to swim as usual, but the change itself delights Narrator (God): in the flooded lake, a flowering bush can be felt beneath the swimmer's feet. A familiar boundary between garden and water has disappeared, making the altered place strange and inviting at once.

When rain continues without pause, swimming seems to offer the right response: more water, rather than shelter from it. Narrator (God) goes to Little Green Lake every day with Nishio-san, who keeps tightly to her umbrella and remains on the dry side of the experience. Narrator (God), by contrast, leaves home already wearing a swimsuit, eager to get wet even before swimming begins. The aim is not simply to reach the lake but to remain immersed. The distinction between the cautious attendant and the child who welcomes the downpour makes the season's appeal visible in their contrasting ways of meeting it.

The greatest pleasure comes when rain falls during the swim. Floating on the lake's surface, Narrator (God) opens a mouth to receive the drops, imagining the universe as generous and the self as thirsty enough to take in its gift. Water is at once below, above, and inside; the child consequently imagines becoming water. Nishio-san eventually calls Narrator (God) out of the lake, warning that too much immersion will dissolve the child. Her warning supplies a counterpoint to the fantasy of limitless absorption: from outside, the child's chosen element is still something that can overwhelm.

Rain as Identity and Rapture

Narrator (God) links water to the meaning of the child's name, one definition of whose Japanese character is rain. From that association grows an expansive self-description: rain is precious and copious, harmless and deadly, joyful and destructive, life-giving and corrosive. Rather than selecting one quality, the child gathers opposites into the same identity and claims invulnerability beyond them. The season makes this imaginative transformation possible through repeated bodily contact with water, not through an abstract observation of the weather.

Rain's power is also figured through its capacity to evade resistance. Roofs and umbrellas may offer temporary shelter; attempts to spit water out or channel it cannot prevent its return. Narrator (God) imagines rain persisting even when cursed for falling through a fourth consecutive day, and embraces its different effects: it can lash faces, drench the countryside, swell sources and rivers, spoil weddings, or consecrate burials. This catalogue holds blessing and curse together. The child does not reduce rain to comfort or danger but finds luxury in its capacity to be both, falling either in sprinkles or in buckets. In this vision, to accept the rain is to let it overwhelm rather than insist on remaining untouched.

Memory and Narrative Significance

The remembered rainy childhood belongs to the period Narrator (God) claims to remember after February 1970. The narrator says that white chocolate supplied an identity and, with it, memory; before that point, recollection depends on what others have said, while later knowledge is described as firsthand. The claim is deliberately difficult to verify: Narrator (God) acknowledges that nobody has reason to accept a memory extending across everything after that date, and says that belief matters less and less. The rain passages therefore carry two kinds of vividness at once: the child's sensuous certainty in the remembered water and the older narrator's frank awareness that such a sweeping claim cannot be proved or disproved.

The season gives that new memory a concrete, recurring world: the terrace, the flooded neighborhood, open manholes, azaleas beneath the lake, and the daily journey with Nishio-san. Its central movement is from watching rain to entering it, then from immersion to identification. Narrator (God)'s retrospective summary that a rainy childhood thrived in Japan like a fish in water condenses the relation: Japan supplies the setting, but water becomes the element in which the child imagines flourishing. Nishio-san's repeated calls to leave the lake keep that sense of freedom in tension with the possibility of excess, while the child's recollection preserves the rain above all as rapture.