The Man from Japan

An aspiring Japanese bureaucrat moves to London when he meets a flaky pop singer named Jane Austen, joins a health club, learns colloquialisms from a boozy journalist, and gains fortune and fame. 12,500 first printing.

In this rarefied romp, a comic take on the mutual misunderstandings between Japan and the West, Akira Suzuki, a sensitive, shy young Japanese writer and bookseller living in London, has an affair with a suicidal English punk rocker turned freelance journalist by the name of Jane Austen. She's not the only one who finds him enticing: Suzuki's randy landlady and an attractive yuppie stockbroker throw themselves at his feet, and a cultured homosexual journalist with whom he swaps informal language lessons also makes passes at him. Australian-born critic and TV personality James ( Fame in the 20th Century ) has done an uncanny job of getting inside the mind of the Japanese intellectual who forgoes his own highly structured society for the rough-and-tumble of Anglo-Saxon ways. Yet, despite deliciously amusing comic turns around language barriers and mutual East-West misconceptions, this subtle comedy of manners is probably a lot more meaningful for a British audience than for American readers.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The picaresque adventures of a Japanese intellectual with a retiring personality who ``craved danger'' in the Metroland of 1980's London, as chronicled by trend-noting British critic James (Flying Visits, 1986; Unreliable Memoirs, 1981, etc.). Young Suzuki, would-be diplomat and writer, has been sent to London by the Japanese government to acquire the ``cosmopolitan ease which cannot be learned at home even in the best schools of etiquette.'' Employed in a Japanese bookstore, Suzuki saves his money while polishing his English--which naturally turns out to be a far more confusing language than he'd anticipated. To overcome his shyness, he joins a health club, where he meets not only the beautiful broker Lilian but also journalist Robertson, who teaches him colloquial English in exchange for Japanese lessons. Meanwhile, London on the eve of the stock-market crash is awash with money and bright, ambitious young people--plus a darker side represented by the pervasive filth in the streets and by drug-taking punks like the suicidal and self-named Jane Austen, whom Suzuki meets in his bookshop. Having craved danger, Suzuki's soon caught up in a mad whirl of complicated love affairs, including one with Lilian, who turns out to be the mistress of a famous tycoon; brawls with nightclub bouncers; and, for a Japanese destined for the diplomatic corps, the worst possible outcome--an appearance in the tabloids, where he's called the ``Japanese Rambo.'' The Japanese embassy is not amused, though Suzuki's English friends are much impressed. About to be sent home in disgrace, he is rescued by an unlikely turn of events that takes him back to Japan--but in considerable style and with enough material for a successful novel. Less the witty sendup of two cultures, which it so strains to be, than just another tale of decline and fall without moral bite. Still, a diverting read. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Suzuki is a young Japanese writer who has come to London bent on enhancing both his English and his cosmopolitan ease. He leads an austere life as a clerk in a Japanese bookstore. His greatest goal, almost unimaginable, is to own an apartment in Tokyo someday. When he meets a nutty punker named Jane Austen, Suzuki's carefully constructed life is disrupted. He writes a poem about Jane's milky skin, but what most attracts him is her air of danger. When Suzuki employs martial arts skills at a high-society party, his story hits the tabloids: he is hailed as the "Sushi Rambo." Suzuki's puzzled interpretations of the English language and British life contribute to the novel's successful hilarity. A critic, poet, and fiction writer ( Fame in the 20th Century , Random, 1993), James is one of Britain's most popular television personalities. Originally published as Brrm! Brrm! in Great Britain (Jonathan Cape, 1991), The Man from Japan will cross over to American audiences with a jolly good splash.
- Keddy Ann Outlaw, Harris Cty. P . L . , Houston
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.