Customer Reviews

Turning Japanese

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Lisa Falloya is half Japanese and half Italian American. She is 29 years old and works in a plant in upstate New York. Her boyfriend works full time while pursuing an MBA degree and consequently has little time to spend with her. Lisa is in a rut. She also loves Japanese manga(comics), so when a Japanese manga company sponsors a contest in which the winner will be given an internship at the company for a year, she enters with the urguining of her two bestfriends Stacy and Perry. Lisa wins and with some trepidation heads off to Tokyo for a year. There she lives with a Japanese family with two problem kids, one a 10 year old terror truant from school who blasts his video games 24/7. The other is a 21 year old who seems to do nothing but party at all hours of the night. At the manga company Lisa is terrorized by her boss who she refers to as Yoda, and the strange ways of Japanese corporate life. The essence of the novel are her struggles to adapt to a new culture and different ways of doing things, as well as come to terms with what she wants to do with the rest of her life. The author's descriptions of the different ways of Japan and America are interesting and humorously portrayed. What troubles me about the novel is that in all the time Lisa lives in Tokyo not once does she venture out into that city to take in its historic and cultural sites. All she seems to do is sample it club/karaoke scene. Only once towards the end of the novel does the author send Lisa on a very brief trip to Kyoto, the description of which takes up a mere two or three pages and seems an obligatory afterthought. Anyone who spends a year in a foreign country with no attempt to see any of it is to my mind vacuous at the least. The story itself is resolved in a pat way. The idea of the novel is a good once, but the execution is flawed.

Great book. This was a novel not about seeing Japan, but about a woman's quest for what is inside herself. Going to another country and following her heart had many complications for the protagonist. Especially chilling is the competition and backbiting that the other women had between each other, which resulted in getting Lisa fired. This can happen anywhere. But she braved it through, and and the end, discovered who she was. Good job, Ms. Yardley, for chronicling the problems of the modern woman- anywhere on the planet.

I love when I come across a book that grabs me from the first page. I'm currently going through a Japanese fixation and I loved all the windows into the culture from a westerners perspective.