The Teradaya Incident

Or how, during the second year of the Keiō era, a woman named Narasaki Ryō saved the samurai Sakamoto Ryōma (or 坂本龍馬).

Well, that's part of it. 

Let's set the scene. The date is March 9, 1866. We're south of Kyoto, in a place called Fushimi, and we're at an inn, the Teradaya (寺田屋). A samurai (and diplomat) from Tosa domain, named Sakamoto Ryōma (he's quite famous, actually) has a room there. This is not something out out of the ordinary, 'cause he has checked in here other times, and is on friendly terms with the inn's landlady, Otose -- a very nice lady, who also liked to help reformers, which Sakamoto is one. (In fact, at this point, Sakamoto has very recently worked to create an alliance between the Satsuma and Chōshū clans).

At this moment, he's in his room (the ume no ma which translates as the plum room -- is this sounding like Clue yet?) with his bodyguard or friend (depends on the book) Miyoshi Shinzō from Chōshū. The room's on the second floor, and the two have basically gotten all ready to just go to sleep. Sakamoto can hear people on the move, trying to be quiet below when....

We now switch to a maid at the inn, who's currently having a soak in the bath.  Her name is Narasaki Ryō, though also known popularly as Oryō . She either is Sakamoto's wife, or sort of girlfriend and/or someone who at some later time becomes his wife. (One place said she got her job at the inn because of being Sakamoto's girlfriend).

It is while she's in the bath that Oryō somehow realizes that Bakufu officers from the Fushimi magistrate were at the inn for a raid/attack. (The magistrate knew that there were anti-Bakufu people at the inn via the grapevine or spies or something like that).

So Oryō foreshortens her bath, goes up the backstairs to Sakamoto and company, telling him about the raid/attack that's in progress. Sakamoto and Miyoshi arm themselves -- the former with a six-shooter by Smith & Wesson (bought in Shanghai by one Takasugi Shinsaku) and the latter with a spear (he also had two swords).

At some point, the fight breaks out (and yes, that's as much detail as I can give you there). During the raid/skirmish/fight Sakamoto's hands get a bit cut up, but he and Miyoshi are able to make a tactical retreat (it was good enough for George Washington, so I don't see why anyone else should have a problem with it). They take shelter in the Satsuma clan's mansion/residence/station that's in/near Fushimi. The End.

Of the incident anyway. As a little addendum-type thing, the Teradaya Inn burned down two years after the attempt on Sakamoto's life. They rebuilt it though, and it kinda memorializes the incident, with a picture each of Ryōma (who also has a statue out front) and Otose in the entrance. Now, the inn's address is located at 263 Minamihama-cho Fushimi, Kyoto.

That same year in the fall, Sakamoto gave an account of the incident to his brother, in writing. If you want to take a look at a translation of Sakamoto's recollection, that is if you want more specific details of the fight, then see the last reference in the reference section below.

(Oh, and if you're wondering why this isn't about the 1862 incident, you are an adept at history. I call this incident the Teradaya Incident because other people have. I know, shameless following! But what can ya do? They're already published.)

References:
Because you don't just have to take my word for it. Take some other peoples' too! ;)
 

"Cool Japan: A Guide to Tokyo, Kyoto, Tohoku and Japanese Culture Past and Present"; Sumiko Kajiyama; 2013

"Seeing Kyoto"; Juliet Winters Carpenter; 2005

"The Satsuma Students in Britain: Japan's Early Search for the "Essence of the West'"; Andrew Cobbing; 2013

"Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen Through the Eyes of the Shogun's Last Samurai"; Romulus Hillsborough; 2014

"Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration"; Marius B. Jansen; 1994

Ochazuke no Aji

"Ochazuke no aji"

Though also the title of a literary work  by  Mori Minoru, the subject of today's post, Ochazuke no aji, is an old movie, known in English as Flavor of Green Tea over Rice. (There are other translations, but that's the one IMBD uses). The first draft being censored, a rework of it was released in 1952. The plot? A marriage in crisis, plus a sub-plot concerning the couple's niece.

Quick History
It goes like this. In 1939, the director, Ozu Yasujirō, wrote a draft for a movie -- unless it was him and a man named Ikeda -- after he came back from Japan's front in China. (He'd had to be in the army as an infantry corporal since July 1937, on account of the Sino-Japanese War). The censors (there was a lot of censorship between 1931 and 1945) objected to it for it's lack of patriotism.

After all, the Motion Picture Law had been passed that year, which meant more censorship than before. Ozu received a "no go" for it in the February of 1940 -- unless it was sometime in 1938. Later a second draft was created either by Ozu and Kōgo Noda or by Noda... or something.  At any rate, Ozu was the director, and in 1952 it was filmed and released in Japan that October, on the 1st. The U.S. release happened in 1964.

Now for the plots.

The 1939 Plot
Be ready, this gets kinda scary (you'll see what I mean). So... there's this couple, their marriage was an arranged marriage. He's a simple things kinda guy, and a dedicated business man, while she's the opposite, up to date on fashion and also selfish. Her husband's existence causes in her soul the bored feeling.

Things get dramatic. The husband gets the draft notice, and is fatalistic about it, while the wife feels distinctly unhappy about it. The night before he's sent out, they have dinner together, where they have (you guessed it), ochazuke. But that's not quite the end of it: during this meal, the wife,  who finds her husband's fatalism irritating, asks if he doesn't want to die. He tells her that he thinks life is a gamble no matter where you are and that he does his best for where he works -- so I guess he has no regrets and does his best, kinda thing? Well, anyway, she starts to cry. What is this husband's response his wife's tears? He slaps her and calls her selfish. (Just wait, it gets scarier). The wife's response to that? She has an epiphany of happiness, and feels herself really loving him.
(Told ya.)

Now, just to clear up any confusion, apparently, the slap was to make her think of being a proper Japanese citizen, not a the slap of "I'm a man, so I don't have to be a decent human being, especially to my wife". Like that makes it any better.

But wait, there's an icky little cherry to go on top scary mess of a story: the last scene has the wife telling her friends about the dinner of violence -- and they say, Yep, that's what men are like!

Feel free to start breathing into a paper bag, if you need to.

So, why on earth was this uncomfortable piece of work not allowed? Officially, the censors said it was because the "couple" ate the wrong thing at the "last dinner together" scene -- though I saw one place say that this only a tradition concerning the movie, not an actual official reason. The censors said that the meal should have been sekihan (red beans and rice), a dish served at celebrations, and the dish that custom dictated was to be served as part of sending off a drafted person. So it wasn't patriotic enough. And it wasn't just that.

Oh no, the draft contained other shameful things such as not being serious enough.  And it mentioned customs and words that were from (gasp!) the Occident. These other two things, you see, were breaking the law, the 1937-1938 Home Ministry Code to be precise. 

The 1952 Plot

First, here's the movie's cast:

Shin Saburi as Mokichi Satake
Michiyo Kogure as Taeko Satake (Mokichi's wife)
Koji Tsuruta as Noboru
Chishu Ryu as Sadao Hirayama
Chikage Awajima as Aya Amamiya
Keiki Tsujima as Setsuko

And now, a brief (possibly incomplete) summary:

It goes like this (some parts may sound familiar by now). There's this well-off couple , right? (They have servants). They have no kids, and the both of them are in their middle years.

The husband, Mokichi, is an engineering company's executive, and is a nice man with simple tastes and of few words, who is also "uncultured" while at table. The wife, Taeko -- a selfish social climber -- finds herself bored with Mokichi, who she calls Dull-chan. Taeko, in her disdain towards Mokichi, even has a habit of lying to him, including lying about going to a spa with her friends and Setsuko, Mokichi's niece.

Watching aunty and her friends talk about their husbands, Setsuko decides that she doesn't want to go into an arranged marriage. Something that her mother has been working on. At some point Aunty Taeko is pressured (by Mokichi's family) to have Setsuko go into an arranged marriage, but Setsuko doesn't bow down -- she tells aunty that arranged marriages are medieval in a bad way, and uses aunty's dead marriage as an example. Setsuko even escapes from an o-miai, a meeting between two prospective marriage partners.

After the o-miai, Setsuko goes around with uncle Mokichi and a man with an office job, Noboru. It is with Noboru that (at some point, dunno when exactly) she visits the city, including a pachinko parlor with a regretful owner and a ramen shop, where they eat -- Noboru also has "low-class" tastes. (Random note: this movie is the first from Japan to use the word rāmen in its script).

When Taeko finds out Mokichi (who, it turns out, always could tell when Taeko was lying) is/was being complicit with Setsuko's unfilial desire to pick her own husband, she picks an argument with him. And then decides she wants to be by herself for a while.

This is, of course, when Mokichi receives the draft, to be immediately put in Uruguay so of course he can't tell her in person what's happening because she's gone off to be alone. But! The plane he gets on has to head back. Taeko is waiting for him at the house, and has spent time thinking. Together they figure out the kitchen and make ochazuke (Mokichi's habit of eating had been annoying to Taeko), each of them having said how much they do care about the other. Taeko realizes that her unassuming pleb of a husband has it right after all when it comes to living. Their marriage is saved.

Ochazuke no aji lasts for a total of either 115 or 116 minutes.  Watch out for a Jean Marais shout-out (I've actually seen him a few times in a 1946 rendition of Beauty and the Beast), and for a restaurant called Calorie --- if you happen to see Tokyo Chorus, it's in there too.

References:
Helping us with our homework every time there's a paper! The places I used:

"Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan"; William D. Hoover; 2011

"The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931-1945"; Peter B. High; 2003

National Library of Australia: 1952, English, Japanese, Video, Captioned edition: Flavour of green tea over rice [motion picture] = Ochazuke no aji. 

Center of Japanese Studies Publications: "Ozu and the poetics of cinema"; David Bordwell; 1988

"The Untold History of Ramen: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze"; George Solt; 2014

 "Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer"; Paul Schrader; 1972

"Ozu"; Donald Richie; 1974

"Eigagaku No Susume"; Mark Howard Nornes, Aaron Gerow (editors); 2001

"War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920-1960"; Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer, H. Eleanor Kerkham (editors); 2001

"Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga", Volume 1; Frenchy Lunning (editor); 2006

"I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies" Jeanine Basinger; 2012

"A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos"; Donald Richie; 2005

"Magill's Survey of Cinema, Foreign Language Films: Ete-Inn"; Frank Northern Magill; 1985

 "New York Magazine"; Oct 15, 1973

IMDB: Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Mugicha (Barley Tea)

A glowing, fluffy field of barley with some pretty, swoopy mountains in back.

Before delving more into Japanese culture, I didn't really even think about barley, except for whenever I came across it in the Redwall books, where one of the uses was to make a drink with it. Someone I know tends to associated barley with beef and barley soup.

So these is barley plants then?

Then came the discovery of and research for a post on mugicha (麦茶 as it's written in Japan), which many people outside Japan other than myself seem to have known about for years and years and years. To these people, mugicha is a (Korean, Japanese and Chinese) drink, as well as a coffee and alcohol substitute. In Italy, for example, it's used as an espresso substitute and they call it cafe d'orzo.

Not to mention it's a diet drink, though I don't know where exactly, believed to help get rid of unwanted fat for you. It's also a laxative, but I don't know how popular it is for that feature. But, I hear (at least some of you) ask, warily eying the last sentence, what is mugicha?

To give you an actual definition, mugicha is a (caffeine-free) drink that's made with toasted barley and water (which means it's a tisane). In Japan, it's a thing to drink it in the summer, and ice is perfectly alright to add to it. Why drink it in summer? Its supposed to refresh those bogged down with the heat of summer temperatures. However, it's also a thing in Japan to drink mugicha warmed up in the winter. Sweetened or unsweetened are both acceptable as well, though I'm not sure if that goes for both hot and cold mugicha or just the cold or what.

Sure looks like pearl barley to me.

As for the taste, let me start with an anecdote that is also blatant post linking: If, like me, you read American Fuji, you may remember the scene where Alex Thorn, one of the main protagonists, is offered some mugicha by his love interest (and other main protagonist), Gabriela Stanton. His reaction? He didn't like it, claiming it tasted like boiled cereal.

He was right -- it tastes like Kashi, the puffed-gain cereal as located in the health food section. And, from my imperfect memory, I think it did sort of have a coffee type roasty-ness too. How do I know this? I made some (for the first time ever) this July. Here's a picture of it:

Want to make your own? There's lots of recipes out there, with lovely pictures on how to make it using pearl barley -- one roasts it via a skillet, no oil or anything, then simmers the result in water. La Fuji Mama's recipe has pictures showing the stages of toasty-ness that the barley goes through while it's in the skillet, as well as other helpful pictures (clicky). ( It was this site I used to make my aforementioned mugicha). La Fuji Mama also says there are several differences between un-hulled barley and pearl barley mugicha -- un-hulled barley mugicha isn't as sweet as the kind made with pearl barley and doesn't exactly have the same flavor.

But while you can make mugicha at home, there are commercial boxes of *huge* bags of it (each bag makes a pitcher), where all one does is put a bag into cold water (that's right -- cold water, a plus in hot weather), and wait for whatever length of time is stated in the box's directions.  These bags use un-hulled roasted barley. If you don't want to spend any time at all making some, there's bottles of pre-brewed mugicha.

Now for a quick little health-scare PSA. There's acrylamide in mugicha (at least, the way the people studying mucha brewed it). This chemical may or may not cause cancer. Boo.

Oh, and one book said it's not barley that's used, it's wheat. And another said barley or rye. Type-o, or a deeper conspiracy? It might be a just type-o, as mugi can be used to mean, among other grains (rye, oats, barley), wheat -- though if you say it without explaining, people think you mean barley.

A pretty rendition of beef and barley soup. Just thought I'd put it here. Enjoy!

References:
Sheesh, this is a long list! (Maybe I should start doing inline citations)

"Keith Michell's Practically Macrobiotic Cookbook"; Keith Michell; 2000

La Fuji Mama: Homemade Mugicha—Japanese Roasted Barley Tea

"Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat"; Naomi Moriyama, William Doyle; 2005

"Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo"; Matthew Amster-Burton; 2013

"A Cook's Journey to Japan: Fish Tales and Rice Paddies 100 Homestyle Recipes from Japanese Kitchens" Sarah Feldner; 2012

"Kyotofu: Uniquely Delicious Japanese Desserts"; Nicole Bermensolo; 2015

"Lonely Planet Japan"; Lonely Planet, Chris Rowthorn, Andrew Bender, Laura Crawford, Trent Holden, Craig McLachlan, Rebecca Milner, Kate Morgan, Benedict Walker, Wendy Yanagihara; 2013

"The Macrobiotic Way: The Complete Macrobiotic Lifestyle Book"; Michio Kushi; 2004

"Five Hundred Fun Facts About Japan"; DIANE Publishing Company, Dorothy Perkins; 1994

"The Sober Kitchen: Recipes and Advice for a Lifetime of Sobriety"; Liz Scott; 2003

"Japanese Food and Cooking"; Stuart Griffin; 2011

"A Dictionary of Japanese Food: Ingredients & Culture"; Richard Hosking; 2014

"Handbook of Bioenergy Crops: A Complete Reference to Species, Development and Applications"; Nasir El Bassam; 2010

"The new beauty: an East-West guide to the natural beauty of body and soul"; 1996

"Berlitz: Japan Pocket Guide"; Berlitz; 2013

"Edible Medicinal And Non-Medicinal Plants: Volume 5, Fruits"; T. K. Lim; 2013

"Teach Yourself Japanese"; Prem Motwani, Noriko Nasukawa, Noriko Nasukawa; 1998


"The Complete Book of Japanese Cooking"; Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, Mitsuko Endo; 2014

"Chemistry and Safety of Acrylamide in Food"; Mendel Friedman, Don Mottram (editors); 2005

Sedōka: The 'Head-Repeat Poem'

Thanks to Nerd Paradise for the 
MS Paint tutorials.  

Lots of kinds of poetry we just don't hear about these days, right? In general, like, everybody knows about iambic pentameter (actually, I don't really), but what about the Pyrrhic meter or the Homeric ode? 

For that matter, everyone knows about haiku (俳句), and you might know about the tanka/waka (短歌/和歌), but there are possibly/probably other kinds of Japanese poetry (some of which are also called waka or 和歌) of which you've yet to hear. 

Like the "head repeated poem" or sedōka (旋頭歌). It's been out of popular use, as I understand it, for nearly 1300 years. Barring any poetry movements that I don't know about.

...If you're still reading this, then I guess I should actually get a move on and tell you about it. Here goes!

   


History Facts 

Poets used the sedōka during the Nara period, until -- during the same period -- the style "died on the vine of abandonment and neglect", as it were (though I've also read people used it until the beginning of the Heian period). For whatever reason, people stopped using it, even before fashion turned its back on the chōka. You can find some sedōka in the Kokin Wakashū (early 900s AD, kanji thusly: 古今和歌集) and in the Man'yōshū (759AD, spelled like this: 万葉集). They're both poetry anthologies, in case you were wondering.

And now, the following fact, which I shall also place elsewhere. I could put it under Meter (that's below), but I put it here, as it fits too. Here it is: precision for the sedōka, and other kinds of waka, wasn't always strictly adhered to (I know, it's supposed to be Japan, right? Just goes to show, you can't trust stereotypes). People would play around with it.

And for that matter, a sedōka's theme could be about anything. 

The Meter

The sedōka is described as having two tercets (had to look that one up), a tercet being three lines. In the sedōka's case, the first line has 5 syllables, the middle one has 7 syllables, and the last one also has 7 syllables, okay? That's 38 syllables. Okay. So, for some unnecessary illustration, that's like:

知りたいよ              shiritai yo                    I want to know, I tell you.

青い目が光る      aoi me ga hikaru            blue eyes sparkle.

この命はね          kono inochi wa ne          this life, you know?

星空 だ                hoshizora da                    it's a/the starry sky

星の光が             hoshi no hikari ga           the stars' light

海で踊 るよ         umi de odoru yo              dance on the ocean 

Yup, I wrote that just for the sake of this blog post -- poetic, yeah? If not exact to the meter. Just remember, I am not fluent. And I don't know how much sense it makes in English, either.

After the first group of 18 syllables, you're supposed to pause before reciting the second group. The pause's supposed to create a sense of dialogue. Why would you want to do that? See below.

How Do You Use Sedōka? 

When people still used the sedōka, one thing I read they used it for was dialogues. The idea was for each chunk of poetry to have a different look at the same thing (I read this after I wrote the above poem)... or at least, that's what you can do. Were there other things? Dunno. Guess I'll have to read the Man'yōshū and Kokin Wakashu to find out. The University of Virginia Library has them both, among others, online for free.

Now, in order to add cultural/psychological weight to this meter, I shall tell you about a historical figure who wrote sedōka: Kakinomoto Hitomaro. He's a poet who died in maybe 708 AD -- apparently he was and is a rather famous poet.

This is a picture I found on (gasp! The shame) Wikipedia. It's supposed to be Kakinomoto and public domain.

References

Just so you can do your own fact checking and not have to rely on my ability to process information (which admittedly tends to need debugging frequently).... here's the places I used to write this post:

 "The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse";Anthony Thwaite ; 2009

"Practical Poetic Anthology"; Poets World-Wide, Passion for Publishing; 2009

"Història del Japó"; Oriol Junqueras i Vies, Dani Madrid i Morales, Guillermo Martínez Taberner, Pau Pitarch Fernández; 2011

"Poetry and Drama: Literary Terms and Concepts"; Kathleen Kuiper; 2011

The Free Dictionary: tercet 

 "Groovy"; Erich J. Goller; 2008

 "Poetry Kaleidoscope"; Nicolae Sfetcu; 2014

 "MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 54"; 2007

Book Review: American Fuji

Mt. Fuji, courtesty the CIA World Factbook.

When I'm at a library, I sometimes do a search on Japan to see what comes up. Other than a lot of manga, which I'm not really into, there are some history books (though usually not as many as I'd like), culture books in the juvenile section and novels, but mostly ones from the fiction section -- that is, novels that aren't from the young adult or juvenile sections. I tend to have great reservation with novels for grown ups -- even greater, perhaps, than the reservation I have toward young adult books.  But I decided to try American Fuji anyway, and this post is my trying to review it.


P.S. Just so you know,  I read this with an overtired mind, got rather annoyed at it partway through (perhaps in part because I was overtired), and am overtired now, writing this. And, I looked at some spoilers on a review site before I was finished (and in doing so was partly misled for a time)...just a typical, opinionated blog post. :D


P.P. S. (By the way, this is light on spoilers, so you can read it with moderate safety! *salutes*) (Also, I did writing this post quite a while after reading the book).


Plot Overview
Published in 2001, and set in 1990 something, American Fuji's plot has two main problems/mysteries to be resolved. The first is the unexplained death of American psychologist Dr. Alex Thorn's son, Cody, from whom he was estranged.


The second one is actually two. Both involve an amazingly qualified college instructor, expatriate Gabriela (aka Gaby) Stanton (also American). Living, I think, in Shizuoka City (maybe?) , Gaby (can't help but wonder if her name's a pun)'s problems/mysteries are:


a.) she was fired from the Japanese university she was working at -- okay, okay, at which she was working. We have no idea why at first, and neither does she.


b.) Why is she living in Japan at all? She knows the answer, but no one else does.


Alex and Gaby end up meeting through Gaby's current workplace, a sort of funeral home with distinctly unusual funeral options, and they set off together (more or less) to find answers to their lives' most persistent questions. (Sorry, I couldn't resist). 


The Genre
But really, half of the time, the novel does have sort of a murder mystery aspect, if not exactly with a distinct noir or Agatha Christie-ness. There's digging through files, traveling to places and interviewing people, discussing clues, etc. However, that's only half of it. And I mean that in a kind of literal way. The other, fifty-ish percent of the time, it's a satire. Not to mention the fish out of water humor on Alex's part.

The Bad
Was it worth it? Let's start with the bad points. And yes, there are some bad points in this novel.  From the beginning of the story, the author regularly inserts completely unnecessary, very nasty, shall we say "adult", passages -- a general problem I've found in novels classed s "Fic"  -- except they also tend to be dull, too. (More on this in The Good section). These chunks of stupidity tend not to last long, but still. (Also at the introduction of Alex, there's a scene in which a mostly sedated fish is eaten alive. Alex throws up and excuses himself. Yeah... I guess that was a "creepy things to avoid in Japan" cultural moment.)


Another not so great point is that the serious side of the story seems perhaps a bit one dimensional, at least where characters other than Gaby and Alex are concerned. There were some bits I didn't quite follow, and possibly that was just me (see the introduction).

Another thing that later got me down a lot was that most characters, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, are not very nice. For instance, all the Japanese children are mindless brats to foreigners, and Gabriela's associates and neighbors (and one of her co-workers) are invasive and/or nasty and/or selfish and/or strict conformists. (The strict conformism is apparently later explained as being the culture of the area she was living in). There's also an exaggerated opinion of the "American" mindset -- which is discussed in a serious context as if it were totally valid.


And finally, at the very end, the wrap up/coming to terms for Dr. Thorn, though I had been skimming on account of being really over-tired, seemed weak.


All the same,  I feel lenient and wouldn't totally discount American Fuji. In fact, I kinda liked it -- though I did get terribly annoyed, with obsceneness and the exaggerated depiction of people, part way through reading it. But the novel also has some good points.


The Good
For instance, the style wasn't that bad. I did want to keep going out of genuine interest for a while, not just morbid curiosity and the odd, dogged sense of finishing what I start to read that I get sometimes with stupid novels (and later regret). So yeah.


The cultural information bits were interesting too -- some of it I recognized, from reading about Japan on the internet and probably other places, (stuff like Pocari Sweat, Otohime, alcohol from vending machines). And, for a time, I was able to laugh at the satirical half of it. And the descriptions of different places in Japan were also interesting, though I suppose there's always the possibility of artistic license when it comes to that.


And here's something I couldn't help but have an appreciation for: Gaby and Alex do not actually end up, ah, having a night together. They nearly do, but don't -- she wants to wait -- and Alex doesn't have a macho tantrum or get all deeply hurt. That is a rarity in grown up books, in my experience. Some of you might not mind such scenes, but by now you've probably guessed that, I do. So, in a way, another good point for American Fuji, in my assessment. Perhaps the author thought all the nastiness she put in made up for it. I dunno. Anways, let's move on to the conclusion.


Conclusion
All in all, the novel undeniably does have a muck problem, don't want to understate that, and it's use of styles were not as blended as I personally would like, and it's a bit flat, but if you're looking for a comedy/mystery that also is a sort of trip to Japan... you, and I say this tentatively, possibly might want to try it. Just remember you'll have to skip over some stupid stuff every so often, and you probably do not want get too involved in the serious side of it.


Oh, and there's undoubtedly all sorts of symbolism and metaphors concerning human interaction in American Fuji. But I'll leave that up to all y'all's (is that a word?) blog posts.


Ta!


References:
Only the one this time.
"American Fuji"; Sara Backer; 2001