Customer Reviews

Country of Origin: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

This novel works on all levels-as a mystery, as a literary novel, and as a sharp examination of late-20th-century Japan. Don Lee has written a terrific, engrossing story which will be enjoyed by anyone who loves a good book.

In 1980, graduate student Lisa Countryman goes to Japan to work on her doctoral thesis. She's half Japanese, half-black, a Berkeley grad who hopes to learn more about her own background through her research. This path turns risky, and at the opening of the novel, Lisa has already disappeared.

The US Embassy official assigned to Lisa's case is on shaky ground himself. Tom Hurley is on his own risky path, hiding his own mixed heritage as he pursues an affair with the wife of a CIA official. A man of such compromised morals wants nothing to do with a disappearance of another bi-racial American, especially one who may have been involved in the Japanese sex underground. Lisa's case falls to Kenzo Ota, a Tokyo detective with so many neuroses that he commands no respect. He gets Lisa's case because in the eyes of his co-workers, the disappearance of such a person is of no consequence whatsoever.

Don Lee weaves Lisa's story through Ota's search for her with fluidity and skill. His pointed look at Japanese society in 1980 is intelligent and interesting, with the additional intriguing reflection on the US reaction to bi-racial Americans. "Country of Origin" is completely satisfying and I look forward to Don Lee's next novel.

Lisa Countryman is abducted in Tokyo, possibly taken by someone related to the Tokyo sex industry. When her sister reports her missing, people in the U.S. embasy dont' seem bothered by her disappearance.

Tom Hurley is a bored diplomat. He's assigned to the case but seems lazy and unambitious; more interested in his daily swims at the embasy pool and his affair with the wife of a C.I.A. officer.

The Japanese police officer assigned to assist with the search is Kenzo Otto. He's a self conscious person who is also preoccupied with other things. He's upset with the noise in his apartment and worried that he won't be able to sleep at night. He's also nervous around his landlord, who takes advantage of him. In addition, he is looked down upon by his peers. We see him bungle his way from place to place as he attempts a half hearted investigation.

Lisa is half Japanese and half African American. Besides wanting to work on her thesis, which was the subservient life of bar girl's in Japan, she was also in search of her family history.

The country of origin of the book's title seems to indicate that Lisa is not of any one race. With being half-Asian American and half African American, she doesn't feel a part of any one race and has no place to belong. In addition, Tom Hurley is half white and half Korean. He tries to hide his identity by telling people that he's Hawaiian.

The novel seemed more of a study of Lisa's attempts to find her way in life. We see her mistakes with the Japanese traditions and the view that Japanese men have toward women and, in particular, women of mixed race.

This novel won the American Book Award and the Edgar Award.

Set in 1980 Tokyo, this debut novel preoccupies itself with the theme of identity born of mixed heritage. At the the plot level, it's a fairly effective mystery about an American woman who goes missing and the sad sack Japanese detective who's assigned her case. The woman is Lisa Countryman, who is ostensibly in Tokyo to research the sex economy for her PhD thesis. She was born in Japan, but was adopted as a baby by a black U.S. military family, and the real impetus for her trip is to locate her birth mother. When her sister in the U.S. eventually calls the embassy for help in locating her, the case is assigned to Tom Hurley. He's a somewhat dissolute 30something consular officer who's mostly interested in bedding the wife of a CIA officer, but is also conflicted about his own mixed heritage. Hurley passes the case on to Kenzo Ota, a lonely, ineffectual, middle-aged police detective invisible to his peers and society in general.

For Ota, the case is an opportunity to get away from his window office (a position of shame in the Japanese workplace at the time) and win some respect from his colleagues. Ota's investigation alternates with flashbacks to Lisa's arrival in Japan, as she drifts from research into bar hostessing, and hires a detective of her own to track down her mother. Meanwhile, a third subplot revolves around Hurley's affair with the CIA wife, Julia, who has somehow heard about the missing Lisa and takes a mysterious interest in the case. There's also a running subplot about Ota's personal life, which includes an encounter with his ex-wife and her son (who may be his), and a budding romance. This is a lot of plot to juggle, and Lee mostly pulls it off, although the book probably could have been much improved by excising or greatly diminishing the Hurley material. The best parts of the book are those that follow Lisa as she navigates the world of fly-by-night English schools and various levels of hostess bars, and those showing the forlorn Ota struggling for redemption. He's the embodiment of one aspect of the Japanese national psyche, the sense that life is suffering and sorrow, and that moments of happiness are the exception rather than the rule.

What's also quite good about the book is the portrait of Japan, although one has to remember that it is set some 25 years in the past (the Iran hostage crisis is a running background element). It's a time when foreigners were present in Tokyo in much lesser numbers than now but Western cultural influence is starting to assert itself. Against all this, the central theme of identity is brought ought through the Japanese preoccupation with racial distinctions and the conflicts deep within many of the characters about themselves. Lee's prose is quite fluid and if the book is guilty of anything, it's of trying to cram in a bit too much. Still, I will certainly keep an eye out for his next book.

Lisa Countryman is the adopted asian/black daughter of a black US Serviceman and his wife. She was brought back to the States at the age of four. She has no memory of her life there or her mother. After the loss of her adoptive parents she decides to return to Japan to look for her birth mother. She does so under the pretext of doing her PhD thesis on the Japanese sex trade.

She becomes a hostess in a gaijan (foreigner) bar that's frequented by upper management japanese. Her job is to entertain only, she is not allowed to go on a dohan (date) with the clients, though she is allowed to accept gifts from them. Her job is very much like that of a true geisha, to entertain her clients but not to have sex with them; unlike the american idea of a geisha, she is not now nor ever was a prostitute.

In Japan, the most racially homogenous country in the world, to be non-japanese and especially to be of mixed race (and especially to be part black) is considered a mark that cannot be overcome. You are not a citizen, cannot be a citizen and therefore are condemned to the lowest level of respect and economic means.

It is 1980, and Tom Hurley (who is half-korean) is working at the US embassy in Tokyo when he is asked by Lisa Countryman's sister to find out where she is so that she can settle some legal issues the two sisters have. Tom is having an affair with the wife of Vincent Kitamaru/David Saito/Bob Sasaki, who is a CIA operative at the embassy. Kitamaru is part of a group who go to Lisa's bar and call themselves Mojo, Larry and Curley.

Tom Hurley has met with a Tokyo detective named Kenzo Ota, who is part of the 'window squad' (a group that has been exiled to window desks because they have nothing else to do but look out the window all day). Kenzo becomes intrigued by Lisa and her disappearance, and even though he's told to lay off by his superiors, he continues to plug away. What he finds in the end makes this a detective story. But what he finds out on the way is a great discussion of the cultural difficulties/racial slurs/ everyday indignities that non-full blooded japanese suffer from in their own country.

Where in the world is Lisa Countryman? Lisa, a twenty-something American woman of mixed-heritage seems to have disappeared after a trip to Japan. As the plot unfolds in "Country of Origin," we learn that Lisa is a Ph.D. candidate looking to write about Japan's matriarchal society. Her research (and need for money) leads her down the dark path of the country's underground sex world in the early eighties, where men pay wads of cash for female companionship. Is it the reason for her disappearance? That's what Kenza Ota would like to know.

Ota, a bumbling detective, is given the task of finding the whereabouts of Countryman. But his lack of skill either leads him to dead ends or two steps behind. Though Ota suffers from the humiliation of being a terrible detective, he takes the Countryman case very seriously since it could redeem him. Meanwhile, Ota deals with the crisis in his personal life, including a divorce that occurred fourteen years ago that left him single and celibate. When his ex shows up in Japan with her teenage son, he is convinced that he is the boy's father. He follows the boy while working up the nerve to speak to him.

Then there's Tom Hurley. Tom, an embassy service officer, gets involved in the case when Lisa's sister contacts him from America. When Tom begins an affair with Julia Tinsley, the wife of a CIA agent, Lisa Countryman's case becomes the highlight of their conversations. Once he learns this, he digs deeper into the case, not because he truly cares but because he wants to keep Julia interested.

This book is not only about the mysterious vanishing of Lisa Countryman, it is also about race, gender, sex, and Japanese culture. The underlying theme of the Japanese's obsession with racial homogeneity is eye-opening and mind-boggling. The underground sex world is described in titillating detail. Author Don Lee, who also wrote "Yellow," is a gifted writer who is best when taking a subject and rolling with it like in this passage:

"Kenzo had always been rail-thin, as was Yumiko, but Simon was fat. Roly-poly, flesh-bobbing fat. Trundling, waddling fat. Wheezing, heaving, lard-ass fat. American fat. What had they been feeding him over there in Atlanta, Georgia? Kenzo could only imagine. Mounded, gelatinous meals, like chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, white biscuit gravy."

Though some of the material may be considered offensive (Africans look like monkeys, Caucasians stink of dairy products, and lighter skin in considered better than a darker hue), it does not take away from the fact that this is an intriguing read. Reading "Country of Origin" is like riding a time machine to Japan's underworld in the late seventies and early eighties. "Country of Origin" is worth the read.

Emanuel Carpenter
Author of "Where is the Love?"
emanuelcarpenter dot com

In 1980 University of Berkley graduate student Lisa Countryman, a half-Japanese, half-black American, conducts her dissertation research in Tokyo on the brutal societal conformity of bar girls. Lisa also has a personal agenda to learn more about who she is as a mixed race person.

Needing work, Lisa finds employment as a hostess girl at a Tokyo men's club. Eventually she vanishes and her disappearance comes to the attention of American Junior Diplomat Tom Hurley, who has no interest in a half-breed's disappearance except as a nuisance that takes him away from the embassy pool and cocktails, which in his mind is more important to a purebred Hawaiian that he insists he is. In fact he is embarrassed by his roots of being a hybrid half-Korean, half white. Police Inspector Kenzo Ota, who spent three miserable teen years in Missouri, investigates the missing American, feeling strongly this case could make his career if he can solve it fast.

This is an interesting look at racial relationships told through the three key characters whose convergence centers on the disappearance. The entertaining story line grips the reader from the moment that Lisa's vanishing is reported and never slows down as Tom half heartedly and Ota fully are engaged in learning what happened to her. Though minor in terms of the plot, the Tokyo embassy is in bright contrast to the stark Iranian hostage situation that is occurring at the same time. Don Lee uses a Japanese police procedural to provide a strong look at is racial origins.

Harriet Klausner

A young American woman is missing in 1980's Tokyo, set against the political backdrop of the Iran hostage crisis and the upcoming presidential election in America. The author positions his characters in a city filled with foreigners and entrepreneurs. That each of the important protagonists has identity issues to deal with adds a racial element to the plot.

Although Lisa is of mixed heritage, she appears white and is viewed as a gaijin. Like many other young women, she has come to Tokyo to earn enough money to solve her financial problems, with or without the appropriate papers. From the first, Lisa runs into problems, each step of her journey more difficult and dangerous, she is unable to make friends or hold a job.

Countryman's case is assigned to the US Embassy, specifically to Tom Hurley, of mixed lineage himself. Hurley pursues a life of few commitments, not too interested in the American's disappearance, other than as a way to maintain contact with his affair of the moment, a woman married to a CIA operative working undercover at the American Embassy. Hurley's contact with his liaison in the Tokyo police department introduces the most likeable character in Country of Origin, Kenzo Ota. The detective is divorced, a bit paranoid and insecure, his career on a fast track to nowhere. Using the few leads supplied by Hurley, Ito eventually blunders into solving the mystery behind Lisa's disappearance, changing the direction of the story.

The characters interact in an international, complex society, a city filled with energetic pursuit of enterprise. However, Americans are not particularly popular in Tokyo in the 1980's and there is a subtle indictment of the United States and the manner in which this culture permeates Japanese life, complete with rock music, clothing and the ubiquitous brand names that identify everything American.

The mystery is particularly intriguing because of the author's emphasis on personal isolation. Lack of identity breeds discontent, at least insofar as these characters fail to make peace with their mixed heritages, as personified by Lisa Countryman. Beginning with the missing girl, each person has personal demons, whether fear, lack of commitment or a sense of disconnection. Mixed racial identities complicate the protagonist's decisions, the need for acceptance vs. personal morality. Luan Gaines/2004