It's easy for a foreigner to feel like a freak in Japan -- tall, different, culturally unaware, linguistically tongue-tied. This wickedly clever novel of manners turns its lens on the foreign protagonist as spectacle, British lawyer Alistair Meadowlark, rather than the usual cast of impenetrable Japanese characters. Written with virtuoso confidence, this first novel hurls along at breakneck speed, its breathless sentences skimming the surface of Tokyo's churning waters and leaving mounds of cultural detritus in their wake.
Therein lie its greatest pleasures. You'll nod in recognition at the city you love to hate and secretly recognize yourself or people you know among these fish struggling to stay afloat.
Meadowlark is the average British stuffed shirt sent to Tokyo to work at a law office. He values tradition, pomp and circumstance and even hangs a framed picture of the queen in his Roppongi apartment. But he's more comfortable in a suit than in his own skin, and one look at the body-conscious girls in their designer outfits makes him realize any traditions they've retained are well beneath the surface, which he doesn't know how to navigate. So he vows to steer clear of Japanese women. Fat chance.