Word: toshi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Daringly, Brown, a Fulbright scholar who lived in Tokyo for seven years, delivers his entire tale through the wide eyes of Toshi, a dreamy young illustrator from a northern village who loves America in part because he knows so little about it. He takes to drinking milk, goes to Tokyo to study at the Very Romantic English Academy (English schools in Japan really do have names like that) and falls in with various foreigners who return the compliment by idealizing him: Jane, a tattooed English teacher in red cowboy boots who mistakes intensity for intimacy; and Paul, a refined advertising...
Inhabiting Toshi's heart and soul with absolute conviction, Brown shows us how Americans might look to a confused admirer, with their "blue-tinged complexions," their "crayon-colored eyes," their habit of wishing on everything, even "when breaking dried chicken bones." In effect, he turns the usual "The Japanese are so strange!" cliche inside out. Toshi's unsteady American girlfriend suddenly says things like, "You think I'm awful, don't you? I am, I'm dreadful and I'm not pretty," and, where the Japanese tend to present images of happy families, Toshi notes, Americans "offer up their unhappy...
Brown evokes the sleek surrealism of Tokyo--where dogs are rented by the hour and people eat green-tea tiramisu cake--with economical aplomb. Even better, he offsets such Tomorrowland aspects with lyrical images of Toshi's rural home, where women eat grilled eel while watching Audrey Hepburn and go looking for candleweed and ghost mushrooms. Toshi is as much a foreigner in Tokyo as any American might be, yet his two worlds are knit together with an exacting precision, with fishermen's nets "the color of dried persimmon," and an American's blanket having "the color of squid just...