Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I'm more than a little disturbed by the Publisher's Weekly review, which states (in part), "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." Did the reviewer read the same poignant, touching, beautiful book that I did?

To the contrary, this book DOES transcend. Yes, the setting - an American, fresh out of college - initially seems like a cliche plot contrivance. Instead, it's the only appropriate setting for the story. In the story, a recent college graduate and her girlfriend move to Japan to teach English. They met at a bereavement support group - the narrator has recently lost her father and her girlfriend, her mother. The two are at crucially different places in their healing.

Every line, every character, every scene of this book was obviously carefully considered, and yet none of it feels even remotely overwrought. Honestly, I haven't been so moved by a book in some time. It's all so real. The character struggles with her grief, with her relationship, with the challenges of her situation in Japan. Yet none of it is an actual struggle - it's too true to life. This isn't a "fish out of water" tale, as Publisher's Weekly suggests. It's the tale of what real people of this age and this generation go through.

If You Follow Me's hilarious and intelligent heroine, Marina, decides to teach English in Japan soon after graduating college, hoping to escape the pain and grief of her father's recent suicide. She finds herself not in cosmopolitan Tokyo or beautiful Kyoto, but in working-class Shika, a town economically dependent on its alarmingly out-of-date nuclear power plant and filled with neighbors and colleagues who monitor her clumsy attempts to adapt to local custom. Living in a tiny house with her cat and her increasingly distant girlfriend, Marina struggles both to mourn her losses and to connect meaningfully with her new community.

The world Watrous creates feels so real that you can easily see yourself in Marina's shoes, dealing with a beat-up car, sneakily disposing of a refrigerator, counseling a student in crisis. Watrous portrays a series of unique and specific characters with empathy, complexity and humor: the teacher struggling with an autistic son at home, the dentist who stretches out his treatments in order to practice English with his patients, and most of all, the proper, sensitive supervisor with whom she may be falling in love. The result is a highly original and moving account of coming of age away from home. Marina's point of view is ironic but never cynical, sympathetic but never sentimental, linguistically clever but never obscure, and above all, self-deprecating and observant on every page. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

This novel was a pleasure to read from beginning to end. I found myself laughing out loud from the start and identifying deeply with the main character Marina as she vulnerably enters a world that feels upside-down from her own. Watrous captures the idealism, confusion, and longing of young adulthood with tremendous heart and humor. I wish this were a book in a series, so that I could follow Marina into the next stages of her life.

As a somewhat jaded reader of the ubiquitous "foreigner-in-Japan" genre, "If You Follow Me" was a pleasant surprise. The "gomi" (trash) metaphor was brilliant, as any foreigner who has lived in Japan can testify to the power of the "gomi police". The characters were well-rounded and came to life on the page; Watrous captures the nuances of Japlish well.
My one gripe with the book is the mistakes in the Japanese:
Page 69: "Her name was Takae, which she told me meant 'expensive' or 'tall'" - the correct word is "takai";
Page 108: The well-known concepts of "tatemae/honne" are rendered as "tatamae" and "honmae";
Page 124: The word "yappari" is rendered as "naturally", but in this case it should be "mochiron" or "touzen";
Page 178: "Mo ichi do" ("once more") is used to express Keiko's frustration with her son's behavior, but here it should be "mata" (which has the nuance of "not again!");
Page 253: "You reek" is rendered as "kusou" but it should be the adjective "kusai".
These mistakes made it hard for me to believe that Marina was fluent enough in Japanese to converse with the locals and so my belief was suspended here and there.
Overall, "If You Follow Me" is a worthwhile and entertaining read, which may be especially useful for someone who is planning to live and work in Japan, or a nostalgic read for someone who has just left.

Perhaps an ideal time for me to pick up this book on a personal level, I was in desparate need to be taken away and If You Follow Me did just that. It allowed me to follow someone else on another journey. I love the innocence in Marina's misadventures as she navigates a world foreign to her - from how to dispose of her waste (making the reader incredibly conscious of how we go about our own impact on the world in this way) to her interactions with her students and mentor. As a person that loves traveling in this and through this life, Marina's experiences are familiar and comforting. The many moments of discomfort and awkwardness in her surroundings and encounters are feelings that transfer to the reader in a way that makes you root for the character - as no one is immune from the more difficult sides of human relationships. I highly recommend this book to anyone open to the world and values the development of relationships we have with those who we encounter on our path.

Years ago, I read Mark Salzman's IRON AND SILK, his story of teaching English in China. Like the main character in this book, he, too, was just out of college and assigned to a small town. IAS became a classic of this genre and IF YOU FOLLOW ME is similarly fascinating. Watrous' heroine is assigned, despite her wishes, to a small town in Japan where she and her college girlfriend are teaching English at local high schools and adapting to the mores of the Japanese bureaucracy, learning about their students' personal lives and interacting with other Westerners in Japan.

Watrous' writing is excellent, the cultural collisions (especially over disposal of garbage) provide moments of hilarity, the romances are well-done and the heroine's healing from her father's recent suicide is sensitively handled. However, my problem with the book, and why I haven't given it more stars, is that I didn't feel that I knew what she was thinking. What she did, yes. What she taught, yes. But not really getting to know her interior life.

A good read, a little too long.

Interesting to a point, I've also taught in Japan, many of the experiences were similar. There just wasn't enough interest to make a book out of this. Maybe a short-ish story. There are better books concerning life in Japan. Blue Eyed Salaryman for example.