There will never be a lack of visitors to Japan who want to share their impressions in print; and the stream of tears from confessional memoirs will never run dry. The demand for such books is obviously strong, but so is the risk of the expat/confessor sounding like a fool. To tackle both genres in one book doubles that risk. Fortunately, Lea Jacobson's gamble in "Bar Flower" pays off.
Jacobson's journey begins when she arrives in Japan to teach at the Happy Learning School of English in Kanagawa. The school arranges for her to live with a Japanese host family, and as a recent English/Japanese graduate with high expectations, she immediately immerses herself in the language and customs. It doesn't take long, however, before she feels the strain of fitting into a foreign society. After an argument with a Japanese psychiatrist who informs her school of her medical history, Jacobson is fired and forced to move elsewhere.
Feeling betrayed by the psychiatrist's breach of confidentiality and horrified at her school's swiftness to label her with a "mental condition" of debilitating proportion, Jacobson stops trying to conform. Instead, she lets her curiosity about Japan guide her actions — whether they be good of bad. She breaks rules, asks impertinent questions, goes places that she shouldn't and says things that she knows no Japanese would get away with. Somewhere along the way she is also lured to hostessing by promises of a fun time and easy money.