An entertaining but shallow read that reveals more about the author than Japan.
The high and low times of a temporary hostess in Japan.
At age 20, former model Haywood decided to travel to Tokyo with her husband Matt to write a book about the curious profession of hostessing. She soon found herself in the city’s infamous Roppongi district, where sex and other vices of all varieties are available for a price. With her blond good looks, she easily found a job at a club. Hostessing in Japan, she writes, “has very little to do with sex, quite a lot to do with psychology and nothing to do with prostitution.” Haywood and the other hostesses—from Europe, America and several places in between—spent long nights in the club fulfilling the fantasy of an adoring girlfriend for an endless parade of lonely, overworked “salary men.” Haywood lit their cigarettes, poured their drinks and listened with feigned interest to their complaints and dreams. There might be dinner outside the club, but it was all fantasy. For a lot of money, the author was “available but unobtainable,” the hostess motto. Still, some customers became friends or more than friends, including Nori, a rich doctor who became obsessed with Haywood; Shin, who became like her big brother; Koji, who may or may not have been a serial rapist; and Yoshi, a handsome, dashing, cocaine-snorting multimillionaire with whom Haywood began to fall in love. The author’s story begins to falter as it becomes more about her unconsummated affair with Yoshi and her struggles to choose between him and Matt. Beyond a discourse on burusera, the Japanese male obsession with schoolgirls and their uniforms, and a hilarious adventure as a dancer on a Japanese pop-music TV show, Haywood fails to delve into her encounters with Japanese culture. Ultimately the narrative becomes part bodice ripper, part teenage diary: e.g., Yoshi was a “groomed, polished, virile specimen…egotistical to the point of narcissism, yet he oozed an invisible nectar that made him irresistibly attractive.” After three months, burnt out from booze, lies and endless partying, Haywood returned to Canada with Matt.
An entertaining but shallow read that reveals more about the author than Japan.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-071-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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