The Floating World [Hardcover]

Cynthia Gralla (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 2003

I see you changing before my eyes, becoming something so marvelously new that I am enthralled beyond measure. . . . Forgive me for even trying to probe the most deeply scented corners of your soul.

A beautiful young American travels across the world, only to surrender to another culture’s macabre nightmares. The Floating World transports us to present-day Tokyo, where avant-garde dancers twist their lives together with renegade geisha, and reality bleeds into fantasy like desire into flesh.

Liza leaves her Ivy-league life behind and escapes to Tokyo, a place where art, politics, and sex seep into each other, and the irradiated ghosts of World War II pulse beneath the neon nightlife. She intends to study butoh, otherwise known as the dance of utter darkness, with master teacher Oshima Kenzo. While working in one of Tokyo’s infamous hostess bars, Liza meets the mysterious Maboroshi, leader of the maiko, a group of neophyte geisha whose expression is as violent as the dance of utter darkness itself. Liza’s journey culminates in the discovery of the most exclusive restaurant in Japan, where men eat intricate delicacies directly off a naked human body. Descending into this midnight underworld, Liza becomes fragmented, delicate, lost: a stranger in her own skin.

From an exciting new voice in fiction comes a sexy, dark literary debut steeped in the rich customs and rituals of Japan. As tempting and tactile as folds of silk, The Floating World is an evocative novel of the flesh that will seduce readers with its sensuous prose. Like the dance that runs through it, the story is a hypnotic exchange: a movement of back and forth, open and shut, secret and revealed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gralla's intricately plotted debut novel parallels the shifting, snaking streets of the Japan she describes. The dark story of art, lust and escape follows Liza, an American college student who travels to Japan to study butoh, a Japanese dance form translated as "the dance of utter darkness," and becomes entangled in Tokyo's sexual underworld. Unlike Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World, Gralla's floating world is one not of high art but of raw sex, of a smart but lost young woman encountering the maiko-geishas-in-training-and all manner of lovers in her quest for self-understanding and, maybe more than she realizes, acceptance. Gralla focuses intently on Liza's body, which she describes as becoming more lithe, thin and fragile, suggesting that inner purity is being achieved through the diminution of the body in space. While explanations of Japanese history and culture sometimes break up the text, the prose can be beautiful, with lyrical descriptions of dance, pain and enchantment with foreignness and self ("I was willing to do anything-fly continents, say, or bloody my hair-if it might only allow me to discard that thing in myself which had been weighed and found wanting"). Gralla succeeds in creating an intelligent contemporary heroine whose perceptive insights illuminate past and future, East and West.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Inspired by a Japanese dance performance known as butoh that she sees in college, Liza impulsively takes off for Tokyo to study with butoh master Oshima Kenzo. In Tokyo, Liza is achingly aware of the physical world around her and her role in it. She takes a job at a fancy hostess bar, where her primary duties are to be on display and to enthrall the customers. She takes two lovers--Carlo, an eccentric, energetic older man from Uruguay, and Mark, an American member of a radical Japanese political group--but neither fulfills her entirely. She meets Maboroshi, a young Japanese woman who introduces her to the maiko, a group of renegade apprentice geisha, and to an exotic restaurant where naked women are part of the display of food. Working and studying in this world of illusions and appearances, Liza loses her own appetite and starts to waste away. There are some overblown elements in this first novel, but overall it gracefully chronicles a young woman's struggles with how the world she inhabits views her. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (March 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345452917
• ISBN-13: 978-0345452917
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,532,204 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Timely, Lyrical, and One-of-a-Kind Novel, March 19, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Floating World (Hardcover)

The Floating World is a book packed with surprises. The first chapter hints that it may be a mere coming-of-age novel in an exotic setting, and while it does offer a new twist on that genre, it is a bottomless work that only reveals more with a second reading. As a former ex-pat in Japan, I was intrigued to find a book about personal experiences in Tokyo that went far beyond the simplistic stranger-in-a-strange-land format to which so many ex-pat novels succumb. The Floating World provides deep personal insights into the culture of Japan and, by extension and contrast, the culture of sex, art, and personal revelation in the West.

Grallas first novel is a novel of ideas, and while it certainly packs in enough breathtaking prose, startling imagery, and erotic scenes to keep the pages turning (despite the density of its content, I found it impossible to put down), it is essentially a novel that questions what it means to explore ones self in the most violent ways. Using a fascinating form of dance called butoh as a framework, The Floating World explores a theme that is distressingly relevant: how can a culture move beyond trauma and a history of devastation? Gralla wonders about the connection that butoh and Japans sex industry might have to the leveling of Tokyo during World War II, and in its meditation on the beauty that may rise from the ashes of war, this book is, needless to say, remarkably timely for a nation on the brink of war itself. Grallas take on the subject is thought-provoking and sophisticated, and the passages describing the history and legacy of butoh are particularly hypnotic.

It is a shame that complex literary fiction like this often has to struggle to find an audience, but I hope that people will take a chance on this first novel. You wont regret it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A highly original and beautiful book, March 6, 2003

By 

Laurie Sands (Santa Cruz, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Floating World (Hardcover)

I picked up this book in the store because I was intrigued by the cover and the subject matter, particular its Tokyo setting. But after I was up all night reading it, I found that it covered an unexpectedly wide range of themes: relationships, love, dance, art, war, being in a foreign country, and anorexia (to name a few!) Specifically, this book gives probably the most lyrical and complex description of the experience of anorexia that I've ever read. The passages about Liza's body and dance training are haunting. Although there is no explicit sex in the book, it is deeply erotic. People who like the films of David Lynch will love this book -- it has that same dreamlike quality. Evocative, engrossing, and full of sensuous writing, it's a very rare and special read. Highly recommended.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and terrifying, March 31, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Floating World (Hardcover)

Gralla's first novel has left me feeling a bit on-edge, as if I was caught off guard and saw something I wasn't supposed to see or wasn't quite ready for. The world she describes is gorgeous, seductive and terrifying. And her style of writing matches it perfectly. I'll have to reread it soon to try to get a better sense of what was real and what might have been hallucination, though I'm not sure it really matters, the two are seamlessly interwoven into Liza's reality. I may actually have nightmares about the maiko; I envision them as pale, pale creatures with sweet, quiet smiles and razor sharp teeth. I was unable to put this book down until I'd finished it; this is the book I'll be buying for all my friends!