Summer in Tokyo: Rain Women, Cicadas, and Visits from the Dead

One reason I fell in love with Japan is the way each season is embraced and celebrated. Living here has changed my view of them—and of myself.

This is Tokyo Journal, a monthly column in which Ann Tashi Slater writes about culture, society, and day-to-day life in Japan.

Not long after graduating from college, I came to Japan to work for a few months, on my way to Paris. I majored in Comparative Literature (the French and Latin American novel) and intended to settle in Paris and be a writer; my plan was to earn enough money teaching English to launch my new life. I’ve now lived in Tokyo for over thirty years. One reason I fell in love with Japan is the way each season is embraced and celebrated. In New Jersey and California, where I grew up, you didn’t see the same poetic attention paid to the seasons. Living here has changed my view of them and of myself.

We are in tsuyu, the summer rainy season, which begins in June and lasts about six weeks. “Tsuyu” means “plum rain,” because now is when plums ripen on the branch. Before I came to Japan, I thought rain was just rain. I’ve since learned there’s shito-shito ame, a light, quiet rain—not to be confused with shobo-shobo, also a light, quiet rain, but in a slightly negative sense. Zaa-zaa is a torrential downpour, potsu-potsu is scattered drops when it’s starting to rain, and bota-bota is heavy drops as rain begins to fall.

In addition to these onomatopoeic words, there are many (hundreds) of expressions related to rain. If it starts raining while the sun is shining, that’s kitsune no yomeiri—a “fox’s wedding”—because the fox, a trickster, is associated with curious events. Ame onna, “rain woman,” is a woman who seems to bring rain wherever she goes. Aiai-gasa, “love-love umbrella,” means two people sharing an umbrella, a couple in love.

Tsuyu is heavy-headed blue hydrangeas and firefly festivals. It’s the little ghost-like teru teru boozu dolls children make from white cloth and hang outside to stop the rain, especially the night before a special outing; my children loved making them before school sports days. Tsuyu is the Tanabata Star Festival, when two lovers separated by the Milky Way reunite. This meeting of the Hikoboshi Cowherd Star and the Orihime Weaver Star takes place on the seventh day of the seventh month, when they cross the shimmering river of stars on a bridge of magpie wings. At all other moments, the lovers revolve in their private orbits, held aloft by the promise and consolation of their brief comings-together. Around our neighborhood, you can see Tanabata bamboo wishing trees: people write wishes on colored paper and tie them to the branches.

Before I came to Japan, I thought rain was just rain.

After the rains come the broiling days of high summer. 2018 was the hottest summer in years, with temperatures over 100 degrees. When my husband and I arrived here after graduate school, the temperature was in the 90s and the humidity about the same. We used all our savings to buy the biggest air conditioner we could afford, and sat in front of it on the tatami straw mat floor of our bare two-room apartment. A Japanese friend couldn’t understand: Like some Japanese people, especially older ones, she didn’t like air conditioning. Of course it’s hot—it’s summer! she said. A middle-aged woman who lived in a traditional wooden house on land that had been in the family for a century, she preferred a deep-mind cooling arrived at through the ting of a fuurin glass wind chime, the view of her garden through a bamboo screen, the reflection of passing clouds in the stone water basin, the lift and flow of a noren door curtain.

Though my husband and I remained attached to our air conditioner, I loved the idea that the sound of things can be cooling, so I bought a fuurin and hung it from the eaves. There used to be a fuurin seller in our neighborhood: Walking down the shopping street on a sultry evening, you’d hear tinkling glass and then an old man would round the corner pushing a cart hung with chimes. The fragile globes were painted with dragonflies and goldfish; a strip of paper inscribed with a poem hung from each clapper, lending a lyrical feeling to the refreshing sound of glass on glass. The central Tokyo area, where we live, is rapidly modernizing: sento public baths and tofu makers are being replaced by reflexology salons and sunglasses shops; the fuurin seller is long gone.

When my children were babies and couldn’t sleep, I’d take them for long walks. In summer, passing the pond in our neighborhood park, I heard plop-plopping as frogs jumped into the water at our approach. It made me feel as though I were living the famous haiku by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho:

Furu ike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto

The ancient pond
A frog leaps in
The sound of the water

 (translated by Donald Keene)

A common summer sight is children running about in the park with nets, trying to catch cicadas. The song of the cicada is the characteristic sound of summer in Tokyo, one I’d never encountered before moving here. Around the end of July, the cicadas hatch after a year or more underground; one day they start singing (or screaming, depending on how you feel about them), as suddenly as if turned on by a switch. There are many species of cicada, so if you listen carefully their song is a symphony. A wistful kind of symphony: Since the cicadas live only a few weeks or so, they are—like the cherry blossoms in spring—symbols of impermanence, telling us that the days of summer, like our days here on this earth, are fleeting. Though not always in the mood to be reminded of my mortality, I like the sound of the cicadas, their cadenced singing. (There are people who like cicadas so much they eat them, raw or boiled, something I won’t be doing anytime soon.)

In the long blue twilights of summer—voices and music and the clink of dishes drifting from open doors and windows—the border between reality and dreams, present and past, living and dead, feels porous. August brings the Obon Festival for the Dead, one of the most important celebrations in Japan. People set lanterns outside their homes to guide the ancestors back for a visit and perform the Bon Odori dance to welcome them. On a high platform erected in the park, a taiko drummer plays along with traditional flute music emanating from loudspeakers. The neighborhood men, women, and children—wearing yukata cotton kimonos—circle around and around the platform in a stylized dance that represents tasks like wheat threshing and rice harvesting. I find it surprising that the Obon tradition continues right in the middle of Tokyo; modern as Japan is, with its bullet trains and neon and robots, you can still feel the beat of its ancient heart. At the close of the festival, lanterns are floated on rivers to guide the dead back to the spirit world. The banks of Tokyo’s rivers were long ago shored up with concrete, diminishing the evocativeness of the festival’s end, but sometimes if the night is dark, you can see only the water carrying the lanterns away, flowing like a bloodline to the past.

In the long blue twilights of summer, the border between reality and dreams, present and past, living and dead, feels porous.

Kigo, Japanese seasonal expressions used in poetry, are lovely. Summer kigo include hashii, cooling on the porch, and aoarashi, a breeze blowing through lush foliage. Many people say summer in Tokyo is their least favorite season, but I like the rain falling, the cicadas singing, the green wind, the way this season in particular makes me feel in rhythm with the surrounding environment and myself.

Noticing the minute attention to the seasons after I arrived in Japan, I felt something inside me begin to shift. I’d grown up believing you shouldn’t devote time to the “non-essential,” a lesson learned mostly at my father’s knee. For my father, a psychiatrist, many aspects of everyday life fell into this category. Time spent contemplating the intricacies of a beautifully landscaped garden, for example, could be better used reading philosophy and having deep talks. He was, as would be expected, highly attuned to the subtleties of human interaction—facial expression, tone of voice, body language—but less so to the nuances of his environment.

When I moved to Tokyo, my view took a turn. The aesthetic pleasure people derived from observing phenomena like different kinds of rain and the cooling sound of glass on glass led me to understand how engaging with the everyday can make our lives richer, open our eyes to the dimensions and beauty of the world around us.