If You Follow Me Book

Oh man, I don't know. I wanted to like this story of a young woman coming to teaching English in Japan while struggling with her reactions to her father's suicide, and it's clear Watrous has lived in Japan and has a keen eye for the absurd or interesting detail (the plastic high school slippers, the sweltering teacher's rooms). But having lived here for more than a decade, I reacted to a lot of this book the way one might react to a horror movie in which the cute young teen suggests they all split up and check out different areas of the spooky house: WHAT ARE YOU DOING STOP THAT. The whole discussion of trash sorting, which the author treats as a cute peccadillo on her character's part, made me break out in a cold sweat: first she and her roommate throw spoiled meat into the plastic garbage. After being told that their neighbor had to pick all the rotting meat out by hand, her roommate throws used tampons into the plastic garbage. This isn't a charming free-spiritness, it's incredibly selfish (and gross!)

Despite her attention to detail, the protagonist is sometimes so lacking in cultural empathy that I couldn't possibly sympathize with her. It's not that I don't agree that female students in Japan could well learn that there's more to life than makeup and boyfriends, or that mothers need more support from their husbands, or that negotiating the maze of unspoken rules here is annoying. But there's a smugness to the book as the protagonist transforms the lives of the villagers with her quirky openness. Imagine a book where a Japanese student comes to live in "redneck America," and by the end of the book has taught the quaint but backwards folk the value of hard work, inspired a young tomboy to be more feminine so she can finally catch a man, and convinced the more disgustingly overweight townspeople to eat a healthy diet of rice and green tea. The scene where the heroine climbs up onto a sumo ring and does an impromptu faux-striptease made me actually gasp in horror: picture someone going to church and in the middle of Communion deciding it would be fun to jump up and do an impromptu performance of "I Like Big Butts And I Cannot Lie."

All of which is basically to say: um, maybe I'm not the best target audience for an expat's amusing fish-out-of-water tale. I've made a lot of errors like the ones the heroine does (failing to catch important implications, breaking rules I didn't know existed, etc.) and believe me, it's not cute or funny. So perhaps I just envy her protagonist--after all, no one wants to read a book that goes "The main character made some really stupid mistakes and as a result she had only limited success and people treated her like she was very strange forever and ever."