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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Gralla's intricately plotted debut novel parallels the shifting, snaking streets of the Japan she describes. The dark story of art, lust and escape follows Liza, an American college student who travels to Japan to study butoh, a Japanese dance form translated as "the dance of utter darkness," and becomes entangled in Tokyo's sexual underworld. Unlike Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World, Gralla's floating world is one not of high art but of raw sex, of a smart but lost young woman encountering the maiko-geishas-in-training-and all manner of lovers in her quest for self-understanding and, maybe more than she realizes, acceptance. Gralla focuses intently on Liza's body, which she describes as becoming more lithe, thin and fragile, suggesting that inner purity is being achieved through the diminution of the body in space. While explanations of Japanese history and culture sometimes break up the text, the prose can be beautiful, with lyrical descriptions of dance, pain and enchantment with foreignness and self ("I was willing to do anything-fly continents, say, or bloody my hair-if it might only allow me to discard that thing in myself which had been weighed and found wanting"). Gralla succeeds in creating an intelligent contemporary heroine whose perceptive insights illuminate past and future, East and West.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Inspired by a Japanese dance performance known as butoh that she sees in college, Liza impulsively takes off for Tokyo to study with butoh master Oshima Kenzo. In Tokyo, Liza is achingly aware of the physical world around her and her role in it. She takes a job at a fancy hostess bar, where her primary duties are to be on display and to enthrall the customers. She takes two lovers--Carlo, an eccentric, energetic older man from Uruguay, and Mark, an American member of a radical Japanese political group--but neither fulfills her entirely. She meets Maboroshi, a young Japanese woman who introduces her to the maiko, a group of renegade apprentice geisha, and to an exotic restaurant where naked women are part of the display of food. Working and studying in this world of illusions and appearances, Liza loses her own appetite and starts to waste away. There are some overblown elements in this first novel, but overall it gracefully chronicles a young woman's struggles with how the world she inhabits views her. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
Gralla's intricately plotted debut novel parallels the shifting, snaking streets of the Japan she describes. The dark story of art, lust and escape follows Liza, an American college student who travels to Japan to study butoh, a Japanese dance form translated as "the dance of utter darkness," and becomes entangled in Tokyo's sexual underworld. Unlike Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World, Gralla's floating world is one not of high art but of raw sex, of a smart but lost young woman encountering the maiko-geishas-in-training-and all manner of lovers in her quest for self-understanding and, maybe more than she realizes, acceptance. Gralla focuses intently on Liza's body, which she describes as becoming more lithe, thin and fragile, suggesting that inner purity is being achieved through the diminution of the body in space. While explanations of Japanese history and culture sometimes break up the text, the prose can be beautiful, with lyrical descriptions of dance, pain and enchantment with foreignness and self ("I was willing to do anything-fly continents, say, or bloody my hair-if it might only allow me to discard that thing in myself which had been weighed and found wanting"). Gralla succeeds in creating an intelligent contemporary heroine whose perceptive insights illuminate past and future, East and West.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Inspired by a Japanese dance performance known as butoh that she sees in college, Liza impulsively takes off for Tokyo to study with butoh master Oshima Kenzo. In Tokyo, Liza is achingly aware of the physical world around her and her role in it. She takes a job at a fancy hostess bar, where her primary duties are to be on display and to enthrall the customers. She takes two lovers--Carlo, an eccentric, energetic older man from Uruguay, and Mark, an American member of a radical Japanese political group--but neither fulfills her entirely. She meets Maboroshi, a young Japanese woman who introduces her to the maiko, a group of renegade apprentice geisha, and to an exotic restaurant where naked women are part of the display of food. Working and studying in this world of illusions and appearances, Liza loses her own appetite and starts to waste away. There are some overblown elements in this first novel, but overall it gracefully chronicles a young woman's struggles with how the world she inhabits views her. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
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