"Being A Broad in Japan: Everything a Western Woman Needs to Survive and Thrive" is a chatty and compendious handbook, covering topics from beauty care to birth control, from disaster haircuts to divorce, with anecdotal and expert opinions backing it up all the way.
Author Caroline Pover has combined thorough research with a style that's easy to read. But it's hard to help wondering whether, with her (literally) cradle-to-grave brief, Pover hasn't set herself an impossible task. Some of the advice is unrealistic: If your Japanese isn't such that "Shikyu shushuku ga juppun oki ni arimasu" (My contractions are 10 minutes apart) rolls off the tongue, then having the "Being a Broad" phrase section on hand isn't, under the circumstances, likely to be of much use.
More seriously, some important areas are barely covered at all. Vegetarians receive a cautionary "beware," with the one-line warning that food ordered as "vegetarian" in a restaurant is likely to come with "bits of bacon lying on top." Equally, while Pover emphasizes that "being an African, Middle Eastern, South American, or non-Japanese Asian woman raises issues that justify books of their own," the experience of non-Caucasian Western women -- different again -- receives not a line in the 515 pages of "Being A Broad."