Green Tea to Go: Stories from Tokyo [Paperback]

Leza Lowitz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0935086323 | ISBN-13: 978-0935086324 | Publication Date: May 2004

Fiction. Asian American Studies. Bay area poet Leza Lowitz, famed for her recent YOGA POEMS: LINES TO UNFOLD BY and her groundbreaking anthologies of Japanese women's poetry A LONG RAINY SEASON and OTHER SIDE RIVER, now turns to fiction, in these twelve stories and a novella set in the ordinary streets of modern Tokyo. "If you've lived in Japan, this collection will awaken memories. If you haven't, you'll find yourself wanting to. Leza Lowitz' s Japan is never cliched. Her Westerners are always trying to go deeper"--Rhainnon Paine. "In these many-faceted stories, Leza Lowitz gives us a view of the world as wryly original as it is sensual and poetic. The collection is an extended meditation on the relationship between place and the interior life"--Dianne Highbridge. "Japan and its people come alive with authentic detail and a subtle, still-fresh sense of discovery"--Alison Anderson.

Product Details

• Paperback: 177 pages
• Publisher: Printed Matter Press (May 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0935086323
• ISBN-13: 978-0935086324
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,749,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, great insights into a unique culture and great writing!!, July 30, 2009

By 

Peter Tieryas "Liu" - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Green Tea to Go: Stories from Tokyo (Paperback)

I love Green Tea To Go- the variety of the stories, the poetry of the language. I've been through this book twice, the first after a five week trip to Asia, the second, while flying to and from Vancouver. Like all good `tea,' there's multiple layers and textures that provoke and excite your senses. The first story, "Notes on Love," is like a conversation, a depiction of `love.' But then it becomes so much more, an exploration of the nuances and complexities of a relationship. "Reply to Anything," is about a revolutionary professor sending postcards from new towns to his old lover (he's been doing this for twenty years). She's moved on and yet she hasn't, lingering on the past, wondering who he is now- I thought this story had a perfect ending. I very much appreciated the surreal elements that occurred throughout as in the story, "Hatchback," a hilarious and at the same time sad sketch of a family and its obsessions. Or how about the "Lighthouse in the Pond," with, "Mariko, however, was never frightened by the appearance of the ghost of her husband. Rather, she was pleased..." The elements are never forced, instead, subtly blended into a world rich with feeling. As the character, Anna, in "Poste Restante," says, "Since she wasn't Japanese, she could let the structure hold her in, yet she didn't have to be bound by it." So we see passion, sorrow, desire, fear, sometimes as a howl, sometimes as a whisper. There's many interesting observations and funny quirks that slip by consciousness but are so distinctive when Lowitz points them out, creating an atmosphere and a mood- you really feel the sense of wonder of seeing it for the first time with the author by your side. In, "Thirty-Six Views of the Imperial Wedding," she writes, "There are as many Japans as there are Americas." In this unique book, I see a vision of many of them and can only hope for more.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book of particular stories written in a unique style., December 8, 2007

By 

Tsering Om (Tokyo) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Green Tea to Go: Stories from Tokyo (Paperback)

I just finished reading this wonderful book. I highly recommend it to all readers wishing to be impressed by particular stories written in a unique style.

"Green tea to go" is a superb compilation of 12 stories and a final short novel. All of them are related in some way to Tokyo, whose impersonal character makes each of the characters' personality emerge. It is a book about relationships, Japanese culture, sex, death, wishes, nature, love, art and many many things.
Each story carries a unique intrigue until the end, when an admirable revelation is unleashed and the reader meets a magic loop moment.
The book is written in beautiful descriptions, brilliant analogies, creative fantasies, impulsive insights, all fused together through magic descriptive poetry.
With her remarkable unique style, Leza Lowitz transports the reader into the depth of her characters. It is through the honesty of their feelings and thoughts that the reader experiences an emerging simplicity from their apparent complexity: the characters dissolve their complex fears in the truth of their hearts. Leza's style explores the truth of the sensations with her human and sensual approach. She plays in her own manner with the cultural differences between the different characters avoiding the use of stereotyping. Somehow, she omits them putting in front their inner sensations, which are universal. Leza teaches us that no matter what our story is, we all share the same needs.
Finally, "Green tea to go" is a tribute to the people that, understanding their true needs, seek for change, accepting freedom in their lives. In the last of the 12 stories, Ryo "finally knew what it felt like to be different, which he now understood was just another word for free".

"Green tea to go is the kind of book that one misses from the moment the last page is turned. I hope Leza will soon come out with another of her inspirational gifts.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reviews of Green Tea to Go, December 30, 2006

By 

www.printedmatterpress.com "Printed Matter Pr... (Tokyo, JAPAN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Green Tea to Go: Stories from Tokyo (Paperback)

Sunday, Dec. 12, 2004 from The Japan Times
THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

CITY OF RELATIONSHIPS: Brewing Emotions and Desires

By STEPHEN MANSFIELD

GREEN TEA TO GO: Stories from Tokyo, by Leza Lowitz. Printed Matter Press/SARU Press international, 177 pp., 2004, 1,500 yen (paper), $15.00.

Is there such a thing as women's literature -- books that authorize a unique take on life, as opposed simply to literature penned by women, work tinged with female sensibilities?

The relationships in Leza Lowitz's new collection of stories are concerned less, perhaps, with questions of gender than between differing states of existence. Lowitz writes a private type of fiction in which the shadowed thoughts of her characters are articulated in whispers and hushed subtleties; quiet disclosures easily missed by the inattentive.

Lowitz's stories circle around the great themes of language, ritual, death and dissolution, unfolding with the candor and intimacy of an unexpurgated journal or pillow book. The outside world may hum and thrum in the background, but it is the private riddles and rituals, the carefully concealed lives of her characters that we attend to.

Though this is a compilation of works that have appeared over a number of years, there is still something fresh and green about these stories. The most unnerving narrative is the first, "Notes on Love," where the author takes us on a journey along the fault lines of yearning, jealousy and suspicion. Rather than submit to torment by the serpents of love, the main character takes the initiative by flying to Tokyo -- city of the self-exile where she, a conspicuous foreigner can, paradoxically, be invisible, temporarily released from the oppression of private history. For Lowitz, like her characters, Tokyo is the "Secret Capital of the World."

Many of the stories take place within "the circle of the Yamanote, the green train that ran around the city like a hyped-up snake." Even during the peak of the bubble economy years, one character, teaching "bored housewives over ten-dollar cups of coffee that tasted like Truckstop Joe," senses that the city is already eroding, its fleeting glamour scoured off. The love hotels in Shinjuku 3-chome are places of instant but rarely lasting gratification, salarymen bars are sinkholes where, after midnight "crusty old men lined the chairs like day-old riceballs," and the waterfront is a place one character associates with going "down to the tough dance clubs near the fish market" where she might find "men to dance with there."

In "The School of Things," an attempt is made by the character to transmit and preserve memories and sensations before they wither.

"Ghost Stories," like many of these pieces, is dark and complex. A tale more heartbreaking than cautionary, it sends a chill down the spine of the book, haunting us for pages to come.

Ultimately the stories remind us how hopeless it is to try to extinguish memory. Instead, a coping mechanism is required. Lowitz's characters have the strength to alter their physical circumstances, but are yet to be healed. They remain, or so it would first seem, resolutely blocked, in a state of delayed shock. The question of how to steady oneself, to retrieve equipoise, underpins these narratives. Within the firm right angles and precision joinery of the structures of these finely crafted stories, the characters are able to take the first step in realigning their lives.

Although a degree of authorial detachment is maintained, the writer herself is firmly implanted in the material, sometimes at skin level, elsewhere in the deeper ligaments of the work. As with a Jane Bowles' novel or short story, the presence of the author is powerfully sensed in the psychology of the characters. You feel that the writer, a flaw here, a phobia there, a saving grace slyly withheld, is keenly aware of this junctioning.

In one of her early diaries, Anais Nin wrote that "I live on two levels, the human and the poetic. I see the parables, the allegories." And so, to her credit and life as a writer, does Lowitz. c) 2004, The Japan Times

*******

In these many-faceted stories, Leza Lowitz gives us a view of the
world as wryly original as it is sensual and poetic. Japan, evoked with
remarkable freshness, is at the center of the stories, but Lowitz's
images send gleaming ripples outward, taking us far beyond the
experience of cultural difference. The collection is an extended
meditation on the relationship between place and the interior life, as
well as a vivid mosaic portrait of her characters, in all their
contemporary complexity.

--Dianne Highbridge, author, "In The Empire of Dreams"

*******
In "Green Tea to Go," Japan and its people come alive with
authentic detail and a subtle, still-fresh sense of
discovery. Whether chronicling a foreigner's first hesitant days in
the bewildering megalopolis of Tokyo, or depicting with tender humor the
stubborn courage of an ancient Japanese widow, Lowitz's stories are
full of versatility and sensitivity. Her talent for breaching the
cultural divide leads the reader on a rich journey.

--Alison Anderson, author, "Hidden Latitudes" and "Darwin's Wink"

*******
Leza Lowitz has attended the best of schools: to take one of her titles,
"The School of Things," which is to say: The School of Words. These
fluent stories are and are not about Japan. They are about those acts of
the imagination that create a Japan most definitely -- on the page.

--Arturo Silva, Editor, "The Donald Richie Reader"

*******
There is an affecting, charming quality to all these stories.
I especially liked "The School of Things." I got to know the sculptor
and his father, and to honor them. Beautiful.

--Gina Berriault, author, "Women in Their Beds"

*******

Kyoto Journal, #59, 2005.
"Love and Hope in Tokyo" by Suzanne Kamata

Before even opening the "macha"-colored cover of "Green Tea to Go," I was a fan of Leza Lowitz's fiction. Full disclosure: as an editor of magazines and an anthology, I've had the chance to read and/or publish several of the stories in this debut collection. I was delighted to read others, including the novella "Poste Restante," about a young widow travelling to the Spice Islands, for the very first time.

The widow, Anna, is an artist expecting to rendezvous with Juliette, who may have been involved with her late husband, and who is also an artist. Lowitz's stories are frequently populated by the kind of people you might expect to find in a pulp novel--movie stars, revolutionaries, writers, sculptors, even a princess--but this book is no guilty pleasure. Lowitz, who draws on her experience as a filmmaker ("Milk") and an art critic ("Art in America" "Asahi Evening News"), crafts each piece with insight and elegance. With her poet's eye, she servces up exquisite details: "Lanterns hung from the rooftop like the feet of ghosts;" in the bath, a man's body "expanded like a tea bag" and "crusty old men lined the chairs like day-old rice balls." And while several of these stories are clasically structured, the writer is not afraid to play with form. For instance, "Figures of Speech" juxtaposes a broken-up Zen koan with various strands of narrative, and the wry fable, "Thirty-Six Views of the Imperial Wedding," loosely resembles a "zuihitsu" (Japanese essay, literary "jottings").

Like Marguerite Duras, who gets a wink in these pages, Lowitz writes unabashedly about love. The opening lines of the award-winning story, "Notes on Love" set the theme:"At first, it starts like this: There is a couple. Say there is a woman, skin and bones and brains and passion, and there is a man. They meet, not in some crowded college lecture hall or on a ski slope, but in a more pedestrian way. In transit. Home from work, or combing the streets at some odd hour, the hour of disappearances and thick airs, morning stillness, the indecision of people not quite willing to give up on a lonely evening."

Whether writing of a housewife contemplating her love of a radical on the lam, or a woman on the verge of suicide saved by a chance meeting with an old classmate, Lowitz shows the warmth at the heart of a huge city. Amid the endless bustle, the neon and noise of Tokyo, there are stories of love and hope."

*******
East Bay Express: Arts and Entertainment, Berkeley, California
by Anneli Rufus, 2004.

"Generation X-Pat"

In Leza Lowitz's short story, "Sayonara, Tokyo," a Berkeley High School alumna contemplating suicide on a Tokyo subway platform meets an ex-BHS classmate. They end up in a love hotel, arguing over whether anyone ever self-immolated in Sproul Plaza, and they savor having escaped from Berkeley and made it to the "Secret Capital of the World." As small and smooth as sake cups, the tales in Lowitz's new collection "Green Tea to Go" (Printed Matter, $15) brim with rainy-day dreams and hearts not quite broken.

Being an expatriate in Japan, real-life BHS grad Lowitz says, means being able to do stuff that native-born Japanese could never get away with. "If we had been Japanese, the rules and codifications of this society would have been unbearable. ... We did not have to abide by them." Working as an editor at a Japanese government think-tank, Lowitz felt free to criticize the boss: "I gave him honest, direct feedback--and he was immensely grateful." We'll have to take her word for that.

These days, she runs a Tokyo yoga studio. "There are three booms right... Read more ›