Love Notes From Tokyo

John Cromwell lives in Tokyo.

Tatiana Silecky is thirty-nine, divorced, and living in Poltava, Ukraine.

They meet online.

For the next eleven weeks, their relationship exists almost entirely inside emails.

There is no narrator explaining what John really means. Nobody tells the reader whether Tatiana is being sincere, cautious, romantic, practical, or all four at once. There are only the messages they send each other—and the assumptions each person makes while reading them.

Slowly, the correspondence changes.

Polite introductions become flirtation. Flirtation becomes intimacy. Plans are made. Expectations grow. Eventually, John and Tatiana must confront the obvious problem with falling in love through writing:

Sooner or later, somebody has to arrive in person.

Based on real-life events and told through dated correspondence, Love Notes From Tokyo is an epistolary romantic comedy about two intelligent adults trying to build a relationship across cultures, languages, geography, and the considerable gap between what people write and what they actually mean.

They fall for each other’s words.

Then the words have to survive reality.