The Men in My Country (Sightline Books) - Hardcover

Abildskov, Marilyn

3.97

39 ratings by Goodreads

9780877459040: The Men in My Country (Sightline Books)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877459045 ISBN 13: 9780877459040

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2004

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In the early 1990s, at the watershed age of thirty, Marilyn Abildskov decided she needed to start over. She accepted an offer to move from Utah to Matsumoto, Japan, to teach English to junior high school students. “All I knew is that I had to get away and when I stared at my name on the Japanese contract, the squiggles of katakana, my name typed in English sturdily beneath, I liked how it looked. As if it—as if I—were translated, transformed, emerging now as someone new.”

The Men in My Country is the story of an American woman living and loving in Japan. Satisfied at first to observe her exotic surroundings, the woman falls in love with the place, with the light, with the curve of a river, with the smell of bonfires during obon, with blue and white porcelain dishes, with pencil boxes, and with small origami birds. Later, struggling for a deeper connection—“I wanted the country under my skin”—Abildskov meets the three men who will be part of her transformation and the one man with whom she will fall deeply in love.

A travel memoir offering an artful depiction of a very real place, The Men in My Country also covers the terrain of a complex emotional journey, tracing a geography of the heart, showing how we move to be moved, how in losing ourselves in a foreign place we can become dangerously—and gloriously—undone.

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About the Author:

Marilyn Abildskov’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in such magazines as Black Warrior Review, Fourth Genre, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Quarterly West. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa, lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga.

From Booklist:

Abildskov's debut memoir follows the travails of a thirtysomething ex-pat in a medium-size city in the Japanese mountains. At 31, Abildskov has no career plans, and is still smarting from a failed stateside relationship. To complicate things in her new environs, she becomes involved with three very different men. Amir is a handsome laborer who works in a noodle shop and sends money home to Iran. Despite his sweetness, he's too young, and he has the distressing habit of wearing bright, primary colors--something that, in Japan, only children do. "The professor," a married historian, is too old and easy to dismiss with his polyester suits and shoes bearing little chains. But Nozaki, a businessman, is just right, until he begins to withdraw from Abildskov's interest. What follows is an astonishing and brutally honest portrait of Abildskov's pursuit of Nozaki. After their brief affair ends, and her passions cool, the author returns to graduate school in the U.S., solitary but ready for the future. Of interest to travelers and those who have humiliated themselves at the altar of love. Rebecca Maksel
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