In Japan, there are professions that elsewhere would seem taken from a work of science fiction: rental girlfriends, temporary relatives, people paid to listen, to walk beside you, to lend you their presence. These are not folkloric oddities: they are pragmatic responses to that urban solitude that Japan has learned to name with the same naturalness with which one orders tea. Within this horizon—where relationships are defined not by intensity but by service, duration, and discretion—Laura Imai Messina places her most delicate invention: a woman who accompanies strangers under an umbrella. A short stretch of road, nothing more. And yet it is there, in that minimal gesture, that the novel finds its power.

It is not a narrative gimmick. Messina has no need to astonish; she needs to observe. The book resembles not a novel in the usual sense—with its plot, its progression, its turning points—but a climate, a meteorological system in which emotions take shape the way water falls: by density, rhythm, inclination. The Japanese words that name the different kinds of rain are not stylistic ornament: they are the emotional vocabulary of a protagonist who registers the world in degrees of humidity and resistance, as if water were the true mother tongue from which she slowly translates her own existence.

The premise—a woman who lends her umbrella for a fee—could sound like material for a romantic anime, yet Messina handles it with a literary awareness far beyond entertainment. In the West, such an idea instinctively recalls Rent a Girlfriend, the manga by Reiji Miyajima, which turned “affective rental” into a narrative machine made of misunderstandings, accelerations, cliffhangers, and emotional triangulations. Messina does the opposite: she starts from the same social infrastructure—a service created to temporarily fill a lack—and distills it into something almost motionless, suspended, delicately asymmetrical. Where Miyajima builds tension, she builds silence. Where the manga multiplies events, she subtracts them until only their imprint remains.

Her Tokyo is not the city of glittering skyscrapers, pulsing districts, and overwhelming crowds. It is a city traveled through precisely where rain alters one’s pace: narrow underpasses, ramps that force you to slow down, the trembling lights of convenience stores reflected in puddles. Places where two people can walk side by side under the same umbrella and remain separated by just a few centimeters—centimeters that mean everything. The novel lives in these margins, in the lower part of the city, where life never raises its voice.

There are pages with the delicacy of Kore-eda, that ability to reveal the dignity of minimal lives without forcing them into a narrative arc; dialogues that seem to “walk” slowly, as in Hamaguchi’s best moments; interiors where light and water merge into a single substance, like in Kawase. And beneath it all, a sense of restrained proximity that in the West we immediately associate with Wong Kar-wai—not by imitation but by affinity of gaze. Messina knows that the strongest emotion is never the one that explodes: it is the one that remains suspended when two people brush against each other and cannot tell whether it is fear or desire holding them still.

And then there is the rain: a silent, omnipresent character. One senses it in the air as in the films of Makoto Shinkai, where water is not simply a backdrop but a condition, a limit, a promise. Shinkai’s “rain metrics”—that way light fractures, how sound changes—find in the novel a literary translation faithful to the emotional effect rather than to the visual one. Messina does not use rain as a poetic symbol; she uses it as a point of view. It is the rain that dictates when to approach, when to wait, when not to risk.

The protagonist, Aya, is never defined through a linear past or a psychology presented like a diagnosis. She is a character who exists mainly by subtraction. The reader knows her through the way she looks at the world, through the details she chooses to note, through the distance she keeps—and struggles to keep—when walking beside others. The clients she accompanies are figures who touch the page and vanish: a chorus of light presences capable of altering a tonal nuance without demanding a scene.

The novel moves like a series of “atmospheric tableaux”: each chapter is a variation on the theme of water and human contact. It is an unusual structure for Italian fiction, and perhaps for this very reason a captivating one: the story does not go from A to B, does not build, does not prepare, does not explode. It happens. Like a shower. Like an encounter. Like that form of intimacy that does not need to manifest itself to exist.

Messina does not propose solutions, does not offer diagnoses, does not bring anything to completion. She does not promise catharsis. She promises minimal truths. And she simply reveals that some stories grow like a forest: slow, layered, accidental, capable of emerging suddenly after years in which they seemed to have disappeared.

The illustrations by Emiliano Ponzi, scattered throughout the volume, are a perfect counterpoint. They do not narrate, interpret, or “decorate.” They amplify. They are surfaces where light yields to rain, where the city tightens into a frame that could be a Shinkai moment were it not for an austerity of color that is entirely Western. Their function is not descriptive but atmospheric: they clarify the emotional climate, not the scene.

Yet the true power of the novel does not lie in the idea or the setting: it lies in the way Messina narrates distance. Some books speak of love; this one speaks of the space that precedes love, or follows it, or replaces it. The space in which one walks without expecting anything, where two people can share a few steps and understand—without saying so—that not every bond must “become” something to be real. Care is not a grand gesture: it is the shadow someone holds over you while it rains, without asking you to reciprocate.

Messina neither resolves nor concludes. She does not offer redemption. She offers a way of seeing. Le parole della pioggia is a book that does not ask the reader for devotion but for presence. You only need to stand under it, as under an umbrella lent by someone you do not know. The stretch of road is brief; the sensation, instead, remains.

It is not a novel about love, and not about its absence: it is about that fragile form of proximity that has no name, needs no future, and does not have to evolve into anything to be true. A provisional relationship, like an umbrella borrowed while it rains.