The thunder rolls...

It's been a stormy day in bookwench land. When I went out earlier to run errands it was sprinkling, and by the time I got to the store it was simply pouring. Of course, I left my umbrella at work a few weeks ago, and so I did the best I could and parked close to the door.

When I got back home, the sun was shining again, and I curled up on the couch with the windows open to finish Bar Flower, which is a memoir of a young American woman who pursued her dream to live and work in Japan in order to become fluent.

I took Japanese as my foreign language requirement in college, and that certainly originally sparked my interest in this book. Oddly enough, something else that grabbed my attention was the book's size. While hardcover, the size is more similar to a trade paperback. It's just about the perfect heft and size for my hands.

Beyond that, I think I was drawn to this book because I know that never in a million years will I go and live in Japan, despite my interest in the nation's culture both past and present. I am far too "different" to feel comfortable spending extended periods of time amongst people who tend to emphasize sameness and fitting in. As Lea reminds her readers, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. And I would certainly stick out like a sore thumb.

So, as in many things, I live vicariously through reading. It's certainly cheaper than travel, no?

Lea starts out teaching English to schoolchildren but loses her job after a particularly unsavory encounter with a psychologist who doesn't have to work under the same privacy limitations that she is used to. When all other options fail, she turns to the thriving bar scene and becomes a bar hostess: a strangely modern evolution of the Japanese geisha.

During my read of this book, I did often think about Arthur Golden's novelization, loosely based on the life of Mineko Iwasaki (whose book I also read and found to resonate perhaps more strongly than the fictional account) , but there were few intersections aside from some more obvious ones. Lea herself is preoccupied with geisha, so these connections are easy to make.

I was actually surprised by the rather abrupt end to Lea's narrative, but it certainly does align with her final exit from the stage of hostessing and addiction. I wish that this part would have been fleshed out a bit more. There were a lot of disorganized, chaotic parts (both in writing and in plot, possibly intentional and symbolic) that could have been more cohesive, and a lot of kind of random information that I wasn't sure where it was going. But this was a memoir and not a novel, and so I tend to be a bit more forgiving, I suppose.

Despite all that, I'm glad I read this one. It was engrossing and interesting and added a new facet to my knowledge of Japanese culture. And it reminded me that I haven't forgotten everything since college--which is always a good thing!

Thunderstorms are rolling through again tonight, so I'm going to wrap this up now and get it posted before the power drops. Tomorrow, Fearless Fourteen, which, thanks to Liz's comments in my previous post, I'll be reading with a grain of salt.