Like France, after World War II Japan has hosted a varied group of expatriate writers. Though no Hemingways or Gertrude Steins have yet emerged, expectation remains.
A part of this expectation is the necessity that you know yourself abroad better than you do at home. As an expatriate you are put into a situation where you become a social unit of one or, in Japan, even less. Deciding upon just who you are, of what your individuality consists, is one of the requisites of any personal writing, but being an expatriate writer considerably dramatizes the experience.
Suzanne Kamata, whose first novel we are here considering, knows the milieu of the local expatriate writer very well, having been the editor of "The Broken Bridge: Fiction From Expatriates in Literary Japan" (Stone Bridge Press, 1997), and written the foreword for "Jungle Crows: A Tokyo Expatriate Anthology" (Printed Matter Press, 2007). Consequently she knows the various problems, all of them potentially dramatic, that can be encountered.