LE PAROLE DELLA PIOGGIA

How many words do you know to describe the rain? This could be the doorway to get into that suspended time the rain can offer us when it begins to fall and takes up space and time.

Le parole della pioggia is an enchanted tale about listening to others, cherishing every chance encounter, and embracing the fragile resilience of all things that fall. It is a story where rain becomes both place and language offering a new way of seeing.

In Tokyo, on rainy days, at the station exit, a woman waits with her umbrella already open, ready to walk beside strangers. It's a job, but also a ritual a precious gesture of attentiveness and care. Beneath that small circle sheltering from the rain, the world seems to pause.
Aya knows this well, as if she has always lived in the suspended time of clouds. She is an umbrella-woman, and everything about her evokes June Japan's rainy season. She always carries with her a worn copy of the Dictionary of Rain Words: the rain of restlessness, made of tiny, endless grains; the fragrant rain that sweeps cherry blossoms from the branches; rain as soft as a cat's fur; the icy rains of winter; fleeting showers; the rain that falls on rivers and hundreds more.

The umbrella-women are students, housewives, the unemployed, the wealthy widowed, women with no other options, and women with dazzling futures. "I was born on a rainy day": only after speaking these words do they take up the immense umbrella they've chosen, step into the street, and walk beside their clients accompanying them wherever they wish to go. Tokyo in the rain is magnificent, a thousand cities in one and, above all, a place of stories waiting to be heard.

The conversations held beneath the umbrella remain secret. There is talking, silence, and stumbling; the outside world disappears. Because, as every umbrella-woman knows, time spent beneath the rain is different.

Aya waits above all for Toru, a young boxer who trains by running up and down the steepest street in the city. She waits for him, even though he will never win. The world, after all, also needs those who lose those who accept the fall, and from the ground, learn to see the world anew.

Laura Imai Messina has composed a chorus of female voices that guard memory and protect what might otherwise slip away a metropolitan fairy tale rooted in the heart of Japanese legend, drawing from that ancient matter the unexpected shape of something new.

Laura Imai Messina was born in Rome in 1981. At the age of twenty-three, she moved to T?ky?, where she obtained a master's degree and a PhD in Comparative Literature. She currently teaches Italian language and culture in T?ky?. She collaborates with numerous Italian cultural inserts, with Japanese radio and television (NHK), and teaches at the Holden School. She lives between Kamakura and T?ky?. Her novels are translated in many languages.