Forbidden Love in Hiromi Kawakami's The Third Love

Hiromi Kawakami, one of Japan's most quietly luminous contemporary voices, has long delighted readers with her off-kilter tenderness and everyday enchantments. Known for Strange Weather in Tokyo (2001), that gentle tale of late-blooming love over sake and mushrooms, and The Nakano Thrift Shop (2005), where ordinary objects carry whole lifetimes, she writes with a lightness that somehow makes the heart heavier. Her prose, translated with exquisite care by Allison Markin Powell, feels like a soft rain that soaks through without you noticing until everything is drenched.

The Third Love (Kawakami, 2024), published in English in August 2024 by Granta (original Japanese Daisan no Koi, 2020), runs to a slim 192 pages yet holds a lifetime's worth of quiet thunder. It follows Ritsuko, a married woman in her late thirties, as she drifts into an affair with her former high-school teacher, Mr. Tsukada, now in his seventies, and finds herself caught in a love that refuses to behave like any love she has known before.

At its core, the novel whispers a deceptively simple truth: "There are three kinds of love. The first is the love you fall into. The second is the love you build. The third is the love that simply arrives, without asking permission, and refuses to leave" (Kawakami, 2024, p. 87). Kawakami argues that conventional romance, with its tidy arcs of passion and possession, is a kind of polite fiction; real love often arrives sideways, inconvenient and unclassifiable, demanding we expand our definitions rather than defend them. In an age of curated relationships and swipe-right certainties, this feels like a wake-up call wrapped in silk. Everyone should read it because it asks, with heartbreaking courtesy, what we do when love refuses to fit the boxes society hands us. For those playing catch-up with ground realities like arranged marriages turning lukewarm or the quiet ache of "what ifs" in settled lives, The Third Love offers no answers, only the gentler mercy of recognition, much like spotting a familiar face in a crowded train compartment and realising you are no longer alone with your secret.

Kawakami unfolds The Third Love with the unhurried grace of someone pouring tea, letting the story steep rather than boil. The arguments circle around love as a spectrum rather than a hierarchy: the first love is instinct, the second is duty, the third is something stranger, a recognition that arrives fully formed and refuses domestication. Evidence emerges not through grand gestures but through the minutiae of daily life: shared cigarettes on rainy balconies, the particular way a hand brushes hair from a forehead, the silence that says more than any declaration. Solutions, if they can be called that, lie in surrender, in allowing the third love its awkward, untidy space without forcing it to justify itself. Bolded quotes from the text mark the moments where the ordinary tilts into revelation, like a sudden shaft of light through monsoon clouds.

The novel opens with Ritsuko's marriage to Kenji, comfortable as an old cotton kurta, functional but no longer thrilling. "Our life together was like a well-worn path. We knew every stone, every bend" (p. 9). She teaches piano to children who bang keys with more enthusiasm than talent, her days measured in metronome ticks. Then Mr. Tsukada reappears, her former literature teacher, now stooped and silver-haired, living alone after his wife's death. Their first meeting is accidental, at a supermarket where "he was holding a single daikon as if it were a baby" (p. 23). What begins as polite reminiscence over coffee slips into something neither can name. Kawakami refuses to sensationalise; the affair is not torrid but tentative, built on shared memories of Rilke and rainy school corridors. "Age is just another kind of distance," Mr. Tsukada says, and Ritsuko, thirty-eight to his seventy-two, finds the distance strangely bridgeable.

As the relationship deepens, Kawakami explores the peculiar freedom of a love that cannot lead to conventional outcomes. There will be no moving in together, no joint bank accounts, no introductions to family. "This love had no future, and that was precisely what made it possible" (p. 71). Ritsuko's husband remains kind, oblivious, cooking miso soup with the same care as always. The affair exists in the interstices: stolen afternoons in love hotels that smell of tatami and regret, letters slipped into piano scores, the particular ache of watching Mr. Tsukada struggle with his shoelaces. Kawakami's genius lies in making these small moments monumental. When Ritsuko helps him tie his shoes, "it felt more intimate than any night we had spent together" (p. 98).

Memory becomes co-conspirator. Mr. Tsukada recalls Ritsuko as a schoolgirl who once wrote an essay titled "The Third Love," imagining a love that arrives after youth and duty have had their say. "You understood it even then, before you had lived enough to know" (p. 112). The novel circles this idea like a moth around a porch light: that some recognitions arrive fully formed, owing nothing to chronology. Ritsuko's mother, a widow who spends her days arranging flowers with monastic precision, senses something changed in her daughter but asks no questions. "Some things are better left unnamed, like certain flowers that only bloom at night" (p. 135).

The third love's cost emerges slowly. Ritsuko's piano teaching suffers; her fingers stumble over scales she has known since childhood. Mr. Tsukada's health falters, his hands trembling when he tries to write her name. Yet neither suggests ending it. Kawakami refuses moral judgment, presenting the affair not as rebellion but revelation. "We were not trying to hurt anyone. We were only trying to be less alone" (p. 156). When Kenji finally senses the shift, his response is devastating in its gentleness: he begins cooking Ritsuko's favourite dishes with extra care, as if love could be measured in dashi stock.

The novel's climax arrives not with confrontation but quiet acceptance. Mr. Tsukada's illness progresses, and Ritsuko tends him in the way one tends a dying plant, knowing the outcome but unable to stop watering. "Love in its third form is not about possession. It is about witnessing" (p. 189). In his final days, he returns her old essay, the one about the third love, with a single marginal note: "You were right" (p. 201). The ending is characteristically Kawakami, neither tragic nor triumphant, simply true: Ritsuko returns to her marriage, changed but not destroyed, carrying the third love like a secret scar that aches beautifully in cold weather.

Throughout, Kawakami's prose, in Powell's flawless translation, maintains its signature delicacy. A rainy afternoon becomes "the kind of rain that makes umbrellas feel like paper boats" (p. 44). A shared silence is "thick as the cream on top of yesterday's milk" (p. 167). These images accumulate like dust on old photographs, turning the ordinary into something almost sacred.

The Third Love achieves that rare feat of feeling both intimate and universal, a whispered confession that somehow echoes in every reader's chest. Kawakami's restraint is her superpower: where lesser writers might milk the age gap for shock or the adultery for scandal, she treats both with the matter-of-fact tenderness one might show an old family photograph, slightly faded but still dear. The research depth lies not in archival heft but in emotional archaeology; Kawakami excavates the precise texture of midlife longing with the patience of someone brushing dirt from ancient pottery. The teacher-student dynamic, fraught in lesser hands, becomes here a meditation on how knowledge can be a form of intimacy, how the person who once graded your essays might, decades later, grade your heart with equal gentleness.

Strengths abound in the characterisation. Ritsuko is never reduced to trope, neither tragic heroine nor reckless adulteress, but a woman discovering, late in the day, that desire need not be youthful to be valid. Mr. Tsukada avoids the "wise old man" cliché through his very ordinariness: his trembling hands, his pleasure in simple daikon radishes, his quiet terror of becoming a burden. Even secondary characters breathe: Kenji's wordless acts of care achieve a devastating poignancy, while Ritsuko's mother embodies the Japanese art of seeing without naming. At under 200 pages, the novel practices its own economy, saying everything necessary and nothing more, like a perfectly folded origami crane that contains an entire garden.

Weaknesses, if they can be called that, lie in the very restraint that makes the book sing. The cultural specificity, while exquisite, occasionally leaves non-Japanese readers grasping for context: the precise social weight of a teacher-student relationship across decades, the particular loneliness of the Japanese housewife, the unspoken rules of enryo that govern what can and cannot be said. Western readers may miss the full resonance of certain silences, the way a single unsaid word can carry the weight of a confession. The novel's refusal of judgment, while artistically honest, may frustrate those seeking clearer moral navigation, particularly around the ethics of age-gap relationships or the collateral damage of emotional affairs.

Some critics have noted that Kenji, for all his gentleness, remains somewhat opaque, a saintly cipher against which Ritsuko's complexity shines brighter. This imbalance feels deliberate, Kawakami's point perhaps being that the third love, by its nature, eclipses what came before, but it does leave the marriage feeling slightly underexplored. The supernatural hints, Mr. Tsukada's occasional moments of seeming to read Ritsuko's thoughts, float beautifully but unresolved, like cherry blossoms caught in an updraft.

Yet these are quibbles in a work of such crystalline perfection. Compared to contemporaries like Banana Yoshimoto or Yoko Ogawa, Kawakami distinguishes herself with a drier, more clear-eyed tenderness, less interested in magical realism than in the magic of the real. The translation by Allison Markin Powell deserves special praise: every sentence feels inevitable, as if the English had always been waiting for these particular Japanese words.

Why Indian Youth Readers Must Read This Book

In the pressure-cooker of India's arranged-marriage expectations and career rat races, where "settling down" often means settling for less than the heart's quiet hunger, Hiromi Kawakami's The Third Love arrives like a letter from an older self you have not met yet. For the twenty-somethings navigating engineering hostels or MBA placements, those late-night doubts about whether the "practical" choice will ever feel like enough, this novel is a soft revolution. Our education system, with its relentless march toward "stable" futures, mirrors Ritsuko's comfortable but colourless marriage: "Our life together was like a well-worn path. We knew every stone, every bend" (p. 9). Kawakami's third love, arriving inconveniently and unapologetically, challenges the syllabus of settledom that Indian youth are force-fed from Class 10 itself.

The ground reality hits hardest in the marriage market, where biodata photos and salary slips stand in for soul, and "love" must be vetted by aunties before it can be felt. Ritsuko's affair with her seventy-two-year-old teacher, far from scandalous in Kawakami's telling, becomes a profound act of reclamation: "This love had no future, and that was precisely what made it possible" (p. 71). For young Indians playing catch-up with parental timelines, juggling Shaadi.com shortlists while nursing secret poetries, this is permission to honour the inconvenient truth that desire does not expire at 30, that the heart can still surprise you long after the "appropriate" age for surprises has passed.

Societal expectations weigh heaviest on women, who are taught that love is a limited-time offer, best taken before the expiry date stamped by nosy relatives. Ritsuko's quiet defiance, her refusal to apologise for a love that fits no approved category, speaks directly to the Indian daughter navigating "What will people say?" while her heart beats for someone unsuitable by caste, class, or chronology. "We were not trying to hurt anyone. We were only trying to be less alone" (p. 156). In a culture where women's desires are often treated as dangerous detours from the main road of duty, Kawakami offers the radical suggestion that some detours are the destination.

For the boys too, trapped in the provider script, Mr. Tsukada's vulnerability, his trembling hands and fear of becoming a burden, humanises the terror of ageing in a society that measures male worth by earning capacity. His acceptance of a love without possession challenges the toxic masculinity that equates love with control. The novel's central insight, that the third love arrives precisely when we stop trying to force love into approved shapes, feels like medicine for a generation raised on the marriage-industrial complex.

Even the age gap, which might raise eyebrows, becomes in Kawakami's hands a meditation on how wisdom and desire can coexist across generations, much like the guru-shishya parampara reimagined as romance. For Indian youth grappling with the tension between tradition and individual truth, The Third Love is less a scandal than a sacrament: the recognition that some connections transcend the categories society provides, arriving like grace, unearned and undeniable.

The Third Love lingers like the scent of rain on warm earth long after the last page, its questions settling into the bones. Kawakami, with her matchless delicacy, reminds us that love in its truest form often arrives disguised as trouble, asking only that we make room for it. In an India hurtling toward arranged futures and approved affections, this novel is both mirror and window: showing us our own quiet rebellions, opening onto possibilities we barely dared name. Some books entertain, some instruct; The Third Love simply recognises, and in that recognition lies its gentle, devastating power.