Country of Origin: A Novel [Hardcover]

Don Lee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2004

LISA COUNTRYMAN vanishes in Tokyo in 1980. The young U.S. Embassy official assigned to her case, Tom Hurley, is in over his head, tangled in an unsavory love affair with the wife of a CIA officer. Lisa's best chance at being found may lie in the improbable hands of Kenzo Ota, a neurotic Japanese cop ridiculed by his peers. Worse, Lisa likely disappeared into the shadow world of Tokyo's sex trade, where a bewildering variety of clubs cater to every imaginable male fantasy, lust, and perversion. The mystery of Lisa's disappearance is intertwined with the mystery of her origins as an "ainoko, a half-breed. For Lisa, as with others involved in her case, alienation and belonging, love and hate, are bound up with race. Every man--guilty and innocent--who seeks her has to come to terms with his own nature and character.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ploughshares editor Lee uses the racial homogeneity of Japan as a stark backdrop to this elegant first novel, a follow-up to his story collection, Yellow. Set in Tokyo in 1980, the book centers on the disappearance of Lisa Countryman, a half-Japanese, half-black Berkeley graduate student who goes to Japan to research the "sad, brutal reign of conformity" for her dissertation and, perhaps more importantly, embark on an identity quest. Her mixed-race background gives her an exotic beauty, and after a teaching job falls through, it lands her a job as a hostess girl at a Tokyo men's club. Echoes of Countryman's identity crisis ring through the lives of all the characters affected by her disappearance. When she vanishes, it is first brought to the attention of Tom Hurley, a vain and careless junior diplomat at the U.S. Embassy who tells people he's Hawaiian, though he's really half-Korean and half-white. The case is turned over to Kenzo Ota, a glum, divorced police inspector, who spent three hard years of his adolescence in Missouri. Convinced that Countryman's case could be just what he needs to put his career back on track, Ota resolves to find out what happened to her. The story of Countryman's time in Japan and her efforts to learn who she is unfolds parallel to Ota's efforts to learn her fate. Through the interlocking stories of Ota, Countryman and Hurley, Lee discourses on race, identity, the Japanese sex trade, social conventions and law. Sharply observed, at turns trenchantly funny and heartbreakingly sad, this novel could be the breakout book for Lee.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* It's 1980, a hard-fought election year in which the Iranian hostage crisis plays an increasingly critical role. But that intrigue exists a world away from Foreign Service junior officer Tom Hurley, a cipher hiding a cowardly episode of treachery in his past. He's coasting through a dull-but-cushy appointment to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and targeting a CIA operative's wife for a bit of dangerous fun. She blipped onto Hurley's radar screen by asking him about the seemingly routine case of Lisa Countryman, a U.S. tourist who disappeared after ditching an under-the-table job at a fly-by-night English language school. The ensuing investigation takes Hurley and clueless police detective Kenzo Ota into Tokyo's seediest corners. It also forces both men to confront their many human failings, and possibly even overcome them. Issues of race, class, and national identity drive this clear-eyed story of closure, redemption, and carving out a place in the world. Lee expertly weaves a tiny new pleasure into every page, from fascinating forays into Japanese culture to wry lines in the vein of "People don't have affairs to get out of their marriages. They have them to prolong them." As satisfying as it is unsettling, this quiet literary triumph eschews plot pyrotechnics for fully realized, deeply felt characters who bumble and struggle their way toward grace much like the rest of us. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (July 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393058123
• ISBN-13: 978-0393058123
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,741,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The search for love and kinship", August 20, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Country of Origin: A Novel (Hardcover)

Part mystery, part character study, and part treatise on the ramifications of race, Country of Origin is probably one of the most unique books to come out this year. With a stark, concise, yet distinctively competent style, Lee has written an engaging and quite illuminating story set against the background of Japan in the early nineteen eighties when there is a lot going on in the world - the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the Olympic boycott, and the Iranian hostage crisis. The story centers on the disappearance of the young American mixed-race girl Lisa Countryman, and the efforts to find her by the American Consular officials and the local police in Tokyo. The narrative cleverly jumps backwards and forwards in time - from the night of her disappearance, told from Lisa's point of view, to the present to where Tom Hurley, the young consular official is looking for her. Throughout this all the characters, whether mixed race American or Japanese wrestle with the questions of race and identity, and the whole effect is like a type of dark, foreboding Lost In Translation with America clumsily, and at times, not very successfully interacting with Japanese culture.

Lisa is in fact both neither white nor straightforwardly American - she is of African- American and Korean heritage - and it is her quest for her real origins among the sleaze of Japan's sex trade that ultimately get her into danger. Lisa wants to recognize where she came from and who she was; "she wants to have a history." When she tries to claim racial solidarity with a group, people don't believe her and she ends up being labeled as a "radical-chic colour of the month." The truth about what happens to her turns out to be unfortunate, and also rather sad; it has more to do with her own angst, stupidity and irresponsibility than with the maneuverings of any malevolent exploiter.

Much of The world in Country of Origin centers on petty bureaucracies of the United States Embassy in Tokyo. The Americans who work in the embassy are assertively individualistic, and they constantly confront a Japanese conformist community that is hidebound by tradition. But beneath the surface of American confidence lurks extraordinary anxiety about identity. The characters are all insecure about themselves and each other, and no one appears they seem. Tom Hurley is half-white and half-Korean, but he routinely lies and says he's Hawaiian. Tom's fellow officers at the embassy, Benny, who is black, and Jorge, who is Chicano, complain endlessly about race. Julia, the woman who Tom is having an affair with is an American wife of a Japanese CIA operative, and she misleadingly tells Tom that she is privately schooled and from old money. The Japanese are conveyed as culturally xenophobic - Kenzo Ota labels whites as "gaijin" who emanate a ''butter stink'' from eating too much dairy. Ota, a compelling and fascinating character, is the middle-aged Japanese detective, who recently stigmatized by divorce, is convinced that something sinister has happened to Lisa.

The novel conveys a country in the throws of a profound change, and a society that is unavoidably bound by loyalty. Loyalty is the basis of the Japanese economic system and "is behind the structure of global alliances between their government bodies and private corporations." The most interesting aspect of Country of Origin is the account of Lisa's months in Japan leading up to her disappearance - the author describes some fascinating locales making the reader feel as though they are right at the heart of Japanese nightlife. There are a many surprises as the novel concludes, although some readers may the final twist in Lisa's story rather anti-climactic and emotionally somewhat lightweight and predictable. Mike Leonard August 04.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of best reads for literary-mystery fiction, October 26, 2004

By 

Donal Heffernan "donal" (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Country of Origin: A Novel (Hardcover)

COUNTRY OF ORIGIIN was a great read: a beautifully written story with considerable color of place and intriguing tension turns. I'm assigning it for my fiction writing class, it's that good. A rare find: one of those packages you get from Amazon.com that offer you a stimulating week--no stop reading once I started.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read!, January 5, 2006

By 

Fred Zappa (Urbana, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Country of Origin: A Novel (Paperback)

I thought this was a great read, though not quite worth five stars. A reviewer below describes the writing style as poor, but I disagree--I think Lee writes very well, very efficiently, without getting in the way of a story that kept me interested at all times. Having read his earlier story collection, Yellow, which is full of surprising characters and situations (and just as well written), I was somewhat taken aback here by the familiar "mystery" storyline. The plot felt a little mechanical, but for the most part, the mystery did keep me going, and the bringing-together of many disparate characters near the end was smooth and convincing.

I also thought most of the characters were fascinating people. The bumbling Japanese detective was especially compelling, a combination of TV's Columbo and Monk whose essential honesty and humanity wins out in the end. The identity issues, and the success some characters have at escaping their former identities and growing into more appropriate or comfortable ones, were also convincing, even inspiring. A reviewer below finds the setting confusing--why 1980 instead of now? Well for one thing, the Iranian hostage crisis was dragging on and on at that time. The idea of a "hostage" symbolizes the identity struggles of many of the characters.

The many details about Tokyo are also fascinating, though at times the piling up of "quirky Japan" examples ("weird" sex bars and love hotels, fetishistic Japanese men, bizzare TV shows, etc.) got to be a bit much. Those able to direct the Western gaze toward Japan should give it credit for more than its "weirdness," which people in the West already tend to know about. Fortunately, the multidimensional Japanese characters offered by Lee balance out those times where he pauses for yet another cultural oddity. Finally, the description of other details of Japanese behavior and thought, such as an underlying expectation that life will consist mostly of sadness, also help to give a fuller sense of Japan. So I think readers should be careful about accepting the novel's accuracy in this regard. As Lee says in an appended author's note, "this novel should not be considered an accurate representation of Japan. Dramatic licenses were freely taken." Overall, a gripping book that I very much recommend.