The Character of Rain

The Character of Rain (French: Métaphysique des tubes) is a 2000 short novel by the Belgian author Amélie Nothomb originally written in French. The English translated edition of the novel was published by Faber and Faber.

Plot

The novel, apparently autobiographical, describes the world as discovered and seen by a three-year-old child born in Japan to a Belgian family. It encompasses the themes of self-awareness, language acquisition, bilingualism, and developmental psychology.

The Japanese believe that until the age of three, children, whether Japanese or not, are gods, each one an okosama, or "lord child." On their third birthday, they fall from grace and join the rest of the human race. The narrator of the novel has spent the first two and a half years of her life in a nearly vegetative state until she is jolted out of her plant-like, tube-like state, and gains a peculiar but complete awareness of the world around her. Most fascinating to the narrator is the discovery of water in oceans, seas, pools, puddles, streams, ponds, and, rain - one meaning of the Japanese character for her name and a symbol of her amphibious life.