Brilliantly observed first novel about the fascination that brings Americans and Japanese together—and the xenophobia that drives them apart. Toshi, from the majestic northern island of Hokkaido, was nine when his soon-to-be-separated mother took him to see Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. From then on, he was entranced by foreigners—so open and free compared to his own repressed, unhappy family and nation. Brown exuberantly describes Toshi's Candidelike progress in hyperactive, modern-day Tokyo—where pet dogs can be rented (an hour a day per week), the Minister of Agriculture commits ritual suicide on TV, and blimps circle overhead, advertising for a bride for the Crown Prince. When he reaches 23, Toshi has become a boy- toy, seduced by American girls and adored by his best friend, gay advertising executive Paul; and his job as staff artist for a popular comic book, Chocolate Girl, allows him to keep life at a surreal distance. His passivity, however, is increasingly challenged after an affair with his kinky English teacher, Jane, turns scary and violent, his father drops dead coming to visit him, and an earthquake devastates Hokkaido. Against a backdrop of Japan turning furiously anti-American under the specter of US imports, these shocks refocus Toshi on the meaning of his parents' separation. As his father's noodle shop is bulldozed, Toshi's mother reveals that she's actually Korean, kidnapped during the war and gang-raped for weeks by Japanese soldiers and factory workers. Toshi's father was a soldier who came to rape her, then stayed to rescue and marry her, even though she could not love him. After so much surreal comedy, this reversal sweeps through the novel like a tsunami, illuminating the war guilt that lies under Japan's frantic embrace of smiley-face consumerism. In a knowingly sentimental close, Toshi finds love with the right American. And Brown, having handled tragedy, satire, and fine descriptions of rural Japan, doesn't flinch from his final hurdle- -depicting happiness. An impressive debut. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-671-52671-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
