(tent) Sunny, Then Cloudy

“Gone, and yet still here.” I saw someone I used to love the other day—there’s no mistake. For a brief moment, I felt I had finally met the one I longed to see for so long. And just as suddenly, I remembered… that person is already gone. In Sunny, Then Cloudy, Hiromi Kawakami weaves together delicate, poetic snapshots of memory, everyday life, and quiet revelations. A collection of short essays and stories where the ordinary shimmers with the strange, the tender, and the slightly surreal. — “The Mood of the Pickling Bed”: There are four kinds of moods a nukadoko (fermented rice-bran bed) can have: cheerful, overly polite, angry, and lonely. — “Midnight at Sea”:“At university, I studied biology. My senior thesis was on the motility of sea urchin sperm tails.” — “Sunny, Then Cloudy”: Back in college, I once glimpsed a café called Sunny, Then Cloudy through the window of a passing bus. I always meant to visit, but I never did. Each piece in this collection offers a fleeting moment of recognition, a quiet sadness, or a gentle smile—like the changing sky itself. Ordinary days become quietly extraordinary in the hands of Kawakami, whose words trace the weather patterns of the human heart.