If You Follow Me: A Novel (P.S.) [Paperback]

Malena Watrous (Author)

Book Description

Series: P.S. | Publication Date: March 9, 2010

Hoping to outpace her grief in the wake of her father's suicide, Marina has come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. But in Japan, as she soon discovers, you can never really throw away your past . . . or anything else, for that matter.

If You Follow Me is at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind of love story. Alive with vibrant and unforgettable characters—from an ambitious town matchmaker to a high school student-cum-rap artist wannabe with an addiction to self-tanning lotion—it guides readers over cultural bridges even as it celebrates the awkward, unlikely triumph of the human spirit.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Watrous's proficient debut, 22-year-old Marina and her girlfriend Carolyn are new residents in a quirky Japanese town where they teach English while learning their own lessons about gomi, or garbage disposal. Aside from the local obsession with trash, living in smalltown Shika is a welcome respite for Marina, who grapples with her father's suicide (he was indirectly responsible for her introduction to Carolyn; they met in a bereavement group), and although she hopes to move past his death during her year in Japan, he begins to feel more alive to her, as if his presence made the trip as well. Meanwhile, the peculiar absurdities of being a stranger in a strange land abound (how does one properly dispose of a refrigerator?), and though this tale of culture shock, growing up, and throwing out isn't especially distinguished from its fish-out-of-water peers, it does the trick as a diversion. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Poor Marina. Her job as an English teacher in Japan isn’t exactly what she expected. She’s been assigned to a remote rural region, where her she lives in a small, dingy apartment, and her students run the gamut from the quirky to the perverse. It doesn’t help matters that she and her significant other, Carolyn, who is also a teacher, are having problems. (Each realizes—too late—that the foreign surroundings and circumstances have placed too much stress on their relatively new relationship.) A well-meaning administrator named Miyoshi does his best to help Marina navigate her way through difficult days. He benefits from the relationship, too; he’s able to practice his English. Marina soon grows fond of Miyoshi. Are her feelings for him simple gratitude for his kindness or something more? Debut author Watrous, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, renders lively prose and memorable characters (there’s a macho Japanese student athlete with an Afro, bronzed skin, and bling), but the outsider theme becomes somewhat repetitive over the novel’s 300-plus pages. --Allison Block

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Product Details

• Paperback: 356 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1St Edition edition (March 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061732850
• ISBN-13: 978-0061732850
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #828,081 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Malena Watrous's stories and essays have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, GlimmerTrain, The Massachussetts Review, Salon.com, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She contributes book reviews to the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. Her novel, If You Follow Me, won the Michener-Copernicus Award, and a prize in the Pirate's Alley/Faulkner contest. She graduated from Barnard College, and received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship. Malena lives in the Mission District of San Francisco with her husband, the composer Matt Schumaker, a toddler named Max, and two cranky cats, where she writes and teaches through Stanford's Online Writer's Studio.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautifully written tale of of a young foreign woman in a small Japanese town, March 22, 2010

By 

Carrie Dunham-LaGree "nomadreader" (Des Moines, Iowa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: If You Follow Me: A Novel (P.S.) (Paperback)

Great literature transcends its characters and plot and brings greater understanding and critical thought, and If You Follow Me is that kind of great literature. It's mostly the story of Marina, who is spending her first year out of college teaching college in rural Japan. She's still dealing with her father's suicide, and her girlfriend, Carolyn, is also teaching in Japan. They're the only foreigners in a small, rural town with a nuclear power plant. They live in the only apartment available for two people.

Watrous did an amazing job of translating the experience of teaching in rural Japan to the reader. The novel opens with the first of what will be many letters informing Marina of her violations of gomi law. The Japanese have a complex system of recycling, burning and disposing of their trash on different days, in different places and with different means. Instantly, I was as dumbfounded and embarrassed as Marina was for her inevitable and unintentional rudeness and violation of law. Perhaps the greatest cultural insults are the ones we commit when we don't even think to ask, such as how to sort our garbage.

Although the novel is told from Marina's point of view, it's brilliance is in the reader's ability to see the story not only through Marina's eyes, but also from the perspectives of the other characters, major and minor, and to truly understand each subtle moment from multiple sides. Many authors use multiple narrators to introduce readers to other points of view, but Watrous weaves language barriers, cultural misunderstanding and the human emotions beautifully into a coherent whole, and Marina still has a strong enough presence to feel like a friend from the novel's first pages. It's a testament to her skill as both a writer and a storyteller that this reader could so easily and quickly understand the perspective of those who have never ventured away from this small town in rural Japan.

Perhaps it's not a novel for everyone. It's not a sentimental tale of teaching English in a foreign land and bridging cultural gaps. It is, however, among the most honest and thoughtful novels I've read in a very long time. If you're a fan of language, cultural divides, and people watching, then you'll probably love it.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A STORY OF COURAGE AND DISCOVERY, March 14, 2010

By 

Ann "Ann" (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: If You Follow Me: A Novel (P.S.) (Kindle Edition)

In IF YOU FOLLOW ME, Watrous writes about people we all know; hers is a story of self discovery in which the reader shares. In many outsider novels, there is the 'other' and then there is the 'known.' In FOLLOW, there is no 'other.'

Though Watrous had me laughing so hard I dropped my book on several occasions, it was often a bittersweet kind of laughter - not "ha, ha, ha." Bittersweet because the writing is so honest. The character of the Japanese supervisor and English teacher is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. His "Japlish" letters are unconventional to say the least, but his affection for his students and for Marina in particular made me love him all the more. You'll meet other Japanese characters in FOLLOW that will seem more familiar than foreign - in particular a first grade boy whose relationship with his autistic brother is complicated but oh so human.

I ordered this book from Amazon this week and finished it almost overnight. I could not attend to anything else. It's that kind of story. Read it. You won't regret it.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious and compelling debut, March 29, 2010

By 

Bowie Creason (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: If You Follow Me: A Novel (P.S.) (Paperback)

I couldn't put this book down!

From the novel's very first letter detailing Miss Marina's culturally improper trash habits to its moving ending with the heroine alone by the sea, If You Follow Me takes the traditional novel of manners and turns it on its head. In many ways, Watrous' writing reminded me of a cross between Jane Austen and Edith Wharton: coincidence, misunderstandings, romance, and disguises abound. The dialogue is sharp and incredibly funny, and the characters are so real. And yet lurking beneath this well-executed, crowd-pleasing structure is a tremendous personal loss that gives the novel its depth, and puts Marina in the company of Countess Olenska and other literary heroines who face down tragedy.

I loved how recycling became a strangely apt metaphor for grief in the book, as Marina learns which things from the past she must throw away, and what will be incorporated into her new life. It's part of Watrous' noteworthy talent that she can take a mundane part of contemporary existence and illuminate it until it reflects back something we didn't know about ourselves. Looking forward to more by this author.