'It has been ten years since I last set foot in Japan; ten years since I finished writing Woman Who Brings the Rain. I was a foreigner, trying to reach another culture, another language, from a place of imperfect understanding.' As precise and nuanced as Japanese calligraphy, this is a memoir of a young writer's stay on the island of Hokkaido in the far north of Japan. At its heart is the iconic mountain, Yotei-san, its presence a constant reminder of seasonal transformation. Touching deftly on the edges of things, folklore, loneliness and learning to belong, Woman Who Brings the Rain is an engaging and poetic meditation on the nature of culture and language. Gramich's engagement with a new unfamiliar place and her love for the natural world sparkles throughout in her own narrow journey to the deep north. She honours the wild and the untranslatable but is also absorbed by the layers of culture which surround her as she struggles to make her way through a world just out of reach.