Customer Reviews

Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms;: A novel,

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of my all time favorite books. The descriptions of the cultures coliding are wonderful. The characters all grow and learn from each other. Richard learns to like himself and to enjoy the differences between life in Japan and Boston. The description of Richard's first experience in the Japanese bath totally describes the feelings of being overseas, alone, and totally confused.

My experiences as a US Army family member in Japan were good and my memories are happy ones. This book reminds me of all the reasons I fell in love with the country and it's gentle people.

This is a wonderful love story.

As beautiful a book as its title. If you liked Memoirs of a Geisha, you will love this.

It is simpler and sweeter and possibly much more memorable than Geisha, more haunting.

I wish it were more widely known so I could reminisce about it with friends. I'm happy it is not because it remains a delicate memory.

John ball has done great job in narrating the experience of an American facing the Japanese culture with the fine tunes of romance woven in it. The characters of people are nicely built. The description of Japanese culture is excellent. The author has dealt the realationship with Richard and Miss One thousand spring blossoms with great sensitivity and very realistically. The supporting characters play a very strong but subtle role in bulding the story. A great reading.... Really a master piece from a great story writer. A Must read.

This is a wonderful love story about a beautiful geisha and an 'everyman' (who considers himself an utter failure with women). After that it is a terrific story of the initial clash of two cultures, with people (from both) having misconceptions and prejudices about the other. In the end just about every character realizes how wrong those initial ideas were and that an open mind is a pretty valuable commodity. [Would love to see this turned into a really good movie...with Russell Crowe or Ioan Gruffudd perhaps as Richard Seaton? (It would have to be set in the '60s - before computers, world travel became so common and when isolationism was the norm in the US).] One of my favorite books, to be reread often.

This is a story of an American man who travels to (1960's) Japan. It is a tale of his experiences in a totally alien (to him) culture. And it is ultimately a love story. The joy of the book is in reading John Ball's ability to immerse the reader in the hero's character and emotions. Also very good, by the same author, "the Winds of Mikamura"

John Ball is best known for his Virgil Tibbs stories of the early 1960s, not least because In The Heat Of The Night was made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. They appeared at the perfect time to insure their popularity, as white America was compelled to come to terms with meeting black America on equal footing. But that's another story.

The result of the Virgil Tibbs books' popularity was to overshadow his other works, which I frankly think are superior to the Tibbs detective novels. And the best of these is Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms.

Set in the electronics boom of the 1960s, we find the hero, Richard Seaton, a design engineer with a New England electronics firm, dispatched by his hidebound company to Japan to oversee the prototype testing and series production of a new electronic testing unit by Matsumoto & Co., a Japanese electronics firm.

Seaton, a very proper Bostonian raised by a widowed mother, is far from a ladies man. He's basketball-player tall, gawky, and shy. No Woman has ever looked at him with interest. Entertaining the client in the traditional Japanese way, Mr. Matsumoto introduces him to the geisha hired to entertain him on his first evening in Japan, Fujikoma, the Number One ranked geisha in all of Tokyo. Not understanding that every second that she spends with him must be paid for by someone - and the services of geisha, much less those of the top geisha of Tokyo, are not cheap - Seaton is smitten with her. To the astonishment of Fujikoma, so is she. He learns something of Japan in her company and that of her maiko (apprentice), her sister Peggy, herself in love with a US Air Force enlisted man. He begins to free himself from the straitjacket of propriety and inhibition his mother strapped on him, gaining confidence as a person and an engineer.

As their romance develops, Mr. Matsumoto wonders if his company's finances will survive long enough for the tester to go into production. As the man who introduced Seaton to Fujikoma, he's responsible for the geisha bills.

Trouble strikes. First, a business rival of Matsumoto's learns of Seaton's mission and subtly sets out to take the business from Matsumoto, using his English-language secretary, Norma Scott, a first-dan black belt judoku built like a Playmate of the Month well versed in female seductive arts, as bait. Second, when the prototype is built, it won't check out. A design error made back in New England requiring a circuitry redesign must be done, and Seaton's time in Japan will be extended. Finally, Seaton learns (from George Sakamoto, the business rival but a good man nevertheless) the facts about geisha and time spent with clients. Seaton's new world collapses around him.

Seeing Seaton in depression bordering on the suicidal, Matumoto's design engineer, Shigeo Fujihara, tries therapy in the form of work, showing him a beyond-the-state-of-the-art project the company had tried and failed to design for the US Air Force. Working through his grief, Seaton accomplishes the impossbile and designs the system the Air Force wanted. As a result, Mr. Matsumoto offers him a vice-presidency and extends the possibility of a partnership in a few years. Seaton promises to consider it.

He returns home with the prototype of the tester he'd been sent to create, and is treated like an errant schoolboy by the bean-counting assistant vice president of the company, despite the fact Seaton and Fujihara's redesign gave the tester an additional mode of function and saved production costs. He quits his dead-end job, accepts Matsumoto's offer of a vice-presidency (at double the salary of the officious assistant vice president of his old company), and returns to Japan as an executive rather than a worker bee. All that remains is to find his great love, Masayo Kanno, aka Fujikoma, aka Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms, and live happily ever after.

Just one problem: She has disappeared into the vastness of the 'willow world,' as the geisha industry is known in Japan. He's an American with a Japanese vocabulary of perhaps twenty words. He does not know the layout of Japan and how the cities and coutryside tie together. He knows less than a dozen people in the entire country. How can he possibly find her? Will he and his Masayo ever be able to be together?

Read the book and find out.

I enjoy this book for a number of reasons. Quite aside from enjoying Ball's writing style and the depth of his research (he was a fluent Japanese-speaker and third-dan black belt in judo), I discovered Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms as a gawky, tall, awkward, shy, socially inept teenager. It gave me hope at a time when I badly needed it. It is a sweet and gentle love story that anyone with a secret sense of romance will appreciate. I cannot recommend it too highly.

I read this book many years ago and had very fond memories of it...started looking for a copy and bought one via Internet several months ago.
This book would make a lovely "period" piece of a movie. The book has so much to say about being open to new experiences and respect for other cultures--wonderfully nuanced as to the different points of view of the characters--and it is such a sweet love story.
Just saw Frances McDormand's new movie yesterday Miss Pettigrew lives for a day--which has much the same light-weight world within a bubble atmosphere and was totally enjoyable because it was so well done...
McDormand produced it so you know it was book she fell in love with--no studio would have touched it otherwise and married to the Cohen god she has lots of arms to twist ...

wish someone with that same type of clout would discover Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms...