A 20-year-old Korean-Japanese woman comes to New York City to work at her Korean uncle's grocery for one dramatic summer in Adachi's sometimes awkward but energetic debut. Yurika Song is supposed to be improving her English-and giving her parents back in Kawasaki a break from her rebellious behavior-and she promptly does so by immersing herself in the subculture of the city's bike messengers. Yurika's education evolves from banter with the sweaty messengers, who impart slang and expletives as she rings up their juice purchases, to breakfast lessons with her cousin Suzie, a party girl who works in a nail salon but aspires to more. She becomes close friends with Whitey, a particularly sensitive messenger whose affections she doesn't return. Yurika must also contend with her disapproving aunt, Hyun Jeong, a flat, wicked-stepmother figure, as well as an erotic affair with Hector, aka Bone, a troublemaking Puerto Rican messenger with little to redeem him but smoldering good looks and "long, dark muscles like a wild animal." The half-Japanese, half-Hungarian author spent time as both a bike messenger and a teacher of English as a foreign language; he portrays badass messengers and Yurika's linguistic struggles with equal facility. A triple-tiered finale of tragedy and violence overwhelms the most rewarding thread of the novel: Yurika's fascination with the English language, "a huge octopus... with so many wild and beautiful limbs writhing about" and her gradual assimilation into a new and heady culture.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The press release accompanying Jiro Adachi's debut novel, The Island of Bicycle Dancers, claims that just as White Teeth offers "an inspired re-imagining of contemporary London as a vital, thriving, schizophrenic mish-mash of international cultures," Adachi's book captures the vibrancy of New York City.
In fact, the books have little in common. White Teeth unfolds over more than 450 pages and focuses primarily on the lives of two families -- one Bangladeshi, the other Jamaican and English. Its power results not only from the multicultural cast but from Smith's formidable comic timing and knack for characterization. By contrast, The Island of Bicycle Dancers is a compact 230 pages. It gets off to an energetic start, but while it aims to evoke a teeming, richly textured milieu, the events and characters Adachi depicts rarely rise above the two-dimensional.
An exception is Yurika Song, our heroine. "Half sushi, half kimchi," Yurika has come to New York at the urging of her Japanese mother and Korean father. They've grown weary of her slacker ways at home in Japan and shipped her off for the summer to learn English, live with her Korean uncle and work in his grocery. There she battles a monstrous aunt who refuses to acknowledge Yurika's Japanese heritage.
Among the store's customers are bike messengers who teach her the finer points of New York slang. Her head fills with a jumble of formal English and urban vernacular, and she develops a crush on one of the messengers, a handsome Puerto Rican boy. As the novel opens, Yurika stands on the street, looking for him and daydreaming of future conversations they might have about her struggles to learn English.
At last he streaks by on his bike, his "long, dark muscles like a wild animal." The novel's best scenes, like this one, capture Yurika's longings and confusions but also evoke the movement of the city. Unfortunately, Adachi does not confine himself to Yurika's point of view. The narration flits from head to head -- more than 10 shifts occur within the first 25 pages alone -- and as the story wears on no unifying narrative perspective materializes. This approach may serve Adachi's vision, but it doesn't make for a fulfilling reading experience. I found myself unmoved by the plights of sundry bit players whose roles seem contrived to add multicultural credibility to an underdeveloped tale.
Yurika's heartthrob is oblivious to her desire, but a homely bike messenger named Whitey pines for her. He imagines "a future where the streets were filled with tasty ethnic cocktails like Yurika, people not fully part of one culture or another but smack in the middle of two or three." Whitey is a likable character, partly because he's given more stage time than most of the others. A refugee from a wealthy WASP family and plagued by acne, he "prided himself on being a living embodiment of his own race's cosmic downward mobility." He befriends Yurika and teaches her about bikes.
After her knack for repairing bicycles becomes apparent, Whitey takes her uptown to buy her own bike from Bone, a thieving Latino messenger with a dangerous reputation. The door opens, and Bone is the boy Yurika's been admiring. The two of them hook up for some hot action -- Bone is everything his name implies -- and Whitey rides around broken-hearted.
That's another thing about the book: It boasts more implausible coincidences than a Dickens novel. As things unravel -- Bone sabotages Whitey's bike with disastrous results, and a throng of angry messengers avenge their friend by beating Bone to a bloody pulp -- it seems that Yurika's cousin has been engaged in a series of one-night stands with Bone.
Adachi's few efforts at humanizing him notwithstanding, Bone is a caricature: the sexualized, emotion-free Latin male. His one-dimensionality easily permits Yurika's predictable realization that she was wrong to spurn Whitey in favor of "her animal man."
Other dramas unfold at home, but there too the characters are flat. Yurika's bitter, conniving aunt is as nuanced as a stock noir villainess. When her husband finally hauls off and slaps her, we can't help but feel relieved, as Adachi presumably intends us to.
The problem is that the relief stems not from engagement but from the hope that the slap will hasten her disappearance from the plotline. Although The Island of Bicycle Dancers is not without its charms, it ultimately left me hoping that Adachi employs his keen observational skills in a second novel with more emotional depth and less dizzying variety.
Reviewed by Maud Newton
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
