It’s impossible to walk the streets of any bustling city in Japan, let alone Tokyo, without musing about the Japanese modern definition of beauty. And still less to do so without comparison to Western ideals. Urban pop art abounds with images of (small nosed; petite) Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn (that urchin haircut again). Consumers have little trouble keeping up with trends – indeed it is a priority to do so. Japan’s second largest world economy status is all-too-blatantly expressed by sky-scraping department stores and hands struggling with plenty of smart shopping bags. As Murakami expresses in ‘UFO in Kushiro’, Japan is unequivocally a cash culture:

“people’s wallets [are] bursting with 10,000 Yen notes, and everyone [is] dying to spend them: The most expensive items are the first to sell out”.

You need never worry about small vendors having enough change for a 10,000 Yen note (£75) when purchasing a chocolate bar. Some vending machines (of which there are hundreds in a ten block radius in Tokyo, providing a great variety of hot and cold drinks; alcohol; and cigarettes) even accept them.

Yet despite the over commerciality of Japan: the up-to-date clothes and gadgets, even the flashing billboards and multicoloured gameshow lights of Electronic City complete with maids lining the pavements ready to lure you into their cafe with a giggle, Japan’s urban life avoids the brashness that characterises Times Square, and (to a lesser extent) Leicester Square. This is because the most endearing and enduring quality of the Japanese people is their humbleness. My trusty free booklet captures this characteristic nicely, describing how “social formalities, etiquette and modesty are instilled in us in our upbringing almost from birth, respect and consideration for others are of upmost importance.” Sounds of “Dozo”, meaning “Please” (“go ahead”) are more than regular. You can find yourself in an endless circle of politeness with another, repeating “Dozo”/”Domo”/”Dozo”/”Domo” – “Please”/”Please” (“thank you”)/”Please”/”Please”. The Japanese rarely say “No” because they dislike being unable to accommodate another. If someone can’t help you, they are likely to tail off, or repeat what they do know (although they seem to have less of a problem saying “No” in English!). It’s a popular opinion amongst social commentators and especially the older generations that an increase in Westernisation will necessarily cause in increase in selfishness, or the every-man-for-himself doctrine. They claim this is already becoming a social epidemic, especially amongst the young and flashy. Overall, I think that Japan, like most places in the world I’ve visited is most guilty of this in its densely populated cosmopolitan areas. On a whole people in the city (dwellers and visitors) are less gracious about giving up their space in a queue to another, and are less likely to offer their priority seat on the tube (even when encouraged to do so by the upholstery).

However during my time in Japan, I never ceased to marvel at the kindly spirit of the Japanese en masse. Cries of “Irimasu” – “Welcome” – and beaming smiles greet customers as they enter every shop. Not once have I received begrudging service in Japan. Even the lift workers on the slopes in Hakuba who have one of the more monotonous jobs of manning the lifts for hours and every fifteen seconds sweeping fallen snow off incoming chairs before ushering skiers and boarders onto them, do so with an accompanying “Dozo” and a bow. At one point on the slopes one of Nikki’s skis wouldn’t stay on and I had to ski (with her skis over my shoulder) down to the nearest lift for help, while she shuffled down as best she could without them. The lift worker could barely understand my English, but he was still exceedingly jovial and helpfully called piste security to aid us. In the meantime he jogged in and out of his hut to fetch a boiled sweet for me while I waited. Many a time when we’ve struggled to communicate with Japanese who speak basic English, more fluent speakers have come to our aid. It’s the little touches that make a world of difference. In fact we owe our visit to Kobe City Museum to a benevolent stranger; who overhearing Nikki and I decide not to enter due to the admission fee being too steep (unfortunately for us we no longer qualify for student discount), insisted on paying for one of our tickets.

Books read whilst in Japan:
A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber and Faber, London: 2005)
In the Miso Soup, Ryu Murakami (Bloomsbury, New York: 2006)
After the Quake, Haruki Murakami (Vintage, New York, 2003)

Komura’s comment is at odds with my experience of the modern Japanese aesthetic, with its love of all things “cute”. “Cute” that is in the Polly Pocket sense of the word – lest anyone accuse of me of being biased against large noses. To express what I mean about the Japanese idea of “cute”, let me tell you of our visit to MaiDreamin, a maid cafe which Nikki, Daz and I visited in Tokyo’s Akihabara aka ‘Electronic City’. Akihabara has earned its other name because it is choc-a-bloc with first and second hand electronic shops; but it is also famed for its maid cafes, born of the area’s manga mania. Waitresses or maids dressed in a variety of maid costumes – from naughty to proper (Victorian) – pepper the pavements with leaflets with the intention of drawing you into their cafe. Once inside, that maid becomes your personal waitress: a role that in our experience included being encouraged to sing along in Japanese whilst forming a heart shape with one’s hands every time a dish was presented; and for the young couple sat on a neighbouring table included playing Jenga with their waitress. Whilst sat in MaiDreamin enjoying a cupcake with a grown up drink, our waitress (dressed in a girl’s tea-party outfit complete with heart print stockings and plaits finished with silk ribbon) stopped by our table to compliment Nikki on her “sooo cute face” and her “tiny features”. “I love cute faces!” she exclaimed before scuttling out of sight. Nikki is very petite and just before we left England had her hair (naturally brunette) dyed bright blond and cut short into the fashionable ‘urchin’ style. We couldn’t hide our amusement at this encounter for long. The impromptu-ness of it coupled with the light irony of our ‘maid’ commenting on another’s cuteness would have been enough to draw a smile, yet the room also looked like an explosion in Hamleys’ Barbie section: decked floor to ceiling in candyfloss pink and teddy bears, and furnished to resemble a 1950s American diner. It reminded me of something Frenchie of ‘Grease: the Musical’ might have dreamt up in her ‘Beauty School Dropout’ sequence.

Of course, Komura’s observation about the “too small nose” might only be significant in terms of the girl he’s describing. It could be that her nose looks out of place amongst larger features. Perhaps it was more out of respect for her pocket that our waitress/maid complimented Nikki (and in doing so drew further attention to her own attractive cutesy persona) in one of the few catering establishments in Japan where tips are worked for as opposed to being considered an insult (probably due to the emphasis on waitress as entertainer rather than mere server). Yet “cute” was the overused adjective of the three weeks we spent in Japan: uttered by the Japanese – “Kampai” (“How cute”) – and us “gaijin” (foreigners) alike. So much so that Nikki enforced a ban on the ‘c word’. However it’s a hard habit to break when Hakuba goth girls match frilly pleated skirts with studded black PVC and twenty face piercings; when the sharpest suits (both sexes) flip open the most advanced touch phones with a jingle created by phone charms, all beads and bells; when the intercom at each major train station sounds a unique jingle/chirp like a robot bird to greet one’s arrival as the train doors open (and which are available to download to your phone as an alert tone); when the upholstery of priority seats on the tube are printed with disability and pregnant lady logos to remind one to be considerate; when electronic toilets complete with heated seats and bidet facilities offer a flush noise button to disguise natural noises.

Phone charms and bag charms are a favourite amongst teenagers, particularly females. Practically every souvenir shop (frequented by natives as much as tourists) has a ‘Hello Kitty’ phone charm stand with tens of alternative themed Kitty varieties. The youth as a whole like to accessorise: they have quirky down to a tee. Quirky is in fact the norm, so that there’s a certain clique factor to young fashion despite its foundation on individuality. Though Harajuku girls boast greater eccentricity than London’s Camden crowd, the former’s ensembles betray a love of coordination: whether by colour, pattern and cut, and often brilliantly, by all three at once. Many Tokyoites sport smoother lines than Barcelona’s fashionistas, but they don’t restrict themselves to black and rich colours; or if they do, they’ll opt for a daring mix-match. Japanese fashion followers like to show off their ability to play with modern trends – with an emphasis on play – though that’s not to suggest that they lack pride in their appearance. You could not accuse the Japanese of that. For a lover of the Vivienne Westwood look – of clashing prints and outlandish shapes (tartan, pleats, and too many layers to comprehend are also staples amongst Japanese trendies) – the Japanese love of order seems paradoxical to the essence of eccentricity. I find myself searching for the ‘scruffs’ or even just the ‘average joes’ for relief from so many uber fashionable and super neat dressers. These constitute an intimidating majority that puts my backpacker (not ‘flashpacker’) clothes to shame. As for scruffs, I spy no more than three whilst Nikki and I wait to meet her friend Saki in the entrance of Shibuya station during rush hour.

Like many non-Brits the Japanese are amused by our concept of personal space. Yet they consider it confrontational to lock eyes with a stranger. Perhaps this is because of the expressiveness of the eye – of its potential to communicate deep feeling, because you couldn’t accuse the Japanese of possessing a closed nature in the way we’d understand it. Overall the Japanese have proved to be disarmingly sweet-natured and gentle in their actions and emotions. The protagonist, Kenji, of In the Miso Soup considers the Japanese character to be an “insular” one. He also claims they are uninterested in ‘gaijin’ (foreigners). I’ve found them to be the opposite. The Japanese show their acknowledgement and respect by bowing. Although it is at first a little disorientating to find the ‘smile-and-you’ll-be-fine’ rule doesn’t apply in Japan (when an essential part of this succeeding is due to smiling with your eyes also), once I got the hang of bowing with an accompanying “Arigatou gozaimasu” (“Thank you very much”), it came to feel more respectful than catching someone’s eye. I think this is because everybody – young, old, native, tourist – does it, so you feel part of a culture of easy politeness. I found myself musing about the two different body actions to indicate “I”: how the Western gesture of pointing to your chest creates a slight barrier between you and another person by jutting out the elbow, whereas touching one’s nose avoids this and encourages closer contact with the face. (An over-analysis if ever there was, but that’s something I’m guilty of!) I hadn’t realised how far I’d sunk into this expectation of geniality until I found myself on the other end of some unprovoked curt treatment from a shopkeeper in a book shop in Auckland airport. The change provoked disappointment and slight anger: proving how true it is that rudeness breeds rudeness, as friendliness engenders the like.

Slumbering commuters ‘bow’ as they sit on the Tokyo underground. No one who’s travelled the London Underground will find it unusual to hear that we often found ourselves sat across from a whole line of people catching forty winks during rush hour, however the scene cuts a different picture in Japan. Japanese snoozers are copycats: all positioned with straight backs and chins tucked neatly into their chests, as if in silent unison not to disturb anyone else with an accidental loll onto a neighbour’s shoulder. Our Australian friend Darren (Daz) captured this contrast perfectly one morning. We were catching the tube to Tsukuji fish market at 5am, after an all-nighter clubbing in nearby Roppongi (known for its nightlife), when he fell into a deep sleep. Unaware of his own head, he slept with it flung back and his lower jaw slackened, offering a perfect view of the roof of his mouth. This pose, which is familiar on public transport at home, looked incredibly out of place amongst the Japanese commuters.

“Nihon e yokoso!” – Welcome to Japan!

Traditional Buddhist Art Gallery, Kobe City Museum

Walking through the gallery my eyes are drawn to a row of warm faces belonging to three statues of priests. Their bronze smiles exude an aura of friendliness and calm due to exaggeratedly broad smiles offset by broad noses. I can’t help but smile in return, and find that my eyes remain fixed naturally on the generous sized noses which appear to represent the literal centrepoint of a generous spirit. I recall two statements I’ve read on my travels: “whereas we in the West point to our chest when we want to say ‘I’…the Japanese point to their noses with their index finger”; “She would’ve been quite pretty if her nose wasn’t so small.” The first is a piece of advice included in my bitesize version of Teach Yourself Japanese that I received free with The Sunday Guardian a timely two weeks before our flight from Heathrow to Narita; the second is an observation made by Komura, the protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s ‘UFO in Kushiro’, in After the Quake (a book I’d been saving to read in Kobe). The booklet is now dog-eared due to its handy pocket size and frequency of use as it’s full of useful pointers like this one. The book also bears marks of backpack travel – though more so since our visit to Kobe Museum, where I stamped a variety of stamps detailing logos of the museum on the inlay in order to create a souvenir of my visit. The stamps are probably intended for visiting school children, but I thought my future self about to re-read a collection of stories about the Kobe earthquake might appreciate the “I’ve been there” statement.

As it happens, and to our surprise (although Lonely Planet suggested would be the case) there’s nothing in the museum documenting the infamous national disaster. Only the introduction in the Museum’s pamphlet briefly mentions that the collections did not receive any major damage in the event. In Tokyo a few days later (our second visit to the capital, as we chose to bookend our seven day exploration of the Kansai region with Tokyo in case we felt we’d missed out anything of particular interest the first time round) this absence took on a poignant significance as we learned of the Okinawa quake that’d hit earlier that day. The quake occurred not long after the 9.4 quake suffered by Chile, though thankfully it was much lower on the Richter Scale. The following day the breakfast news brought the danger even closer to home as it warned of possible tsunamis and precautionary evacuations of coastal habitants. Every channel displayed a map of the country in the bottom right corner complete with coastal regions highlighted and flashing red, yellow, and green to indicate the relative severity of the threat in each section. Luckily no tsunami transpired. A week later in New Zealand whilst on the Kiwi Experience* I met a luckier girl. She’d been in Chile during the quake, and had thankfully escaped unharmed though the hostel she was asleep in at the time sustained considerable damage. Lucky a second time, she found herself amongst the first and small few (only a planeload of people) to be allowed to leave the country in the aftermath – and as a result found herself harangued by a local TV news reporter. When she left, two days in the quake’s wake, buildings were still collapsing and clean water supplies had been exhausted. Hardly surprisingly she said she couldn’t bear imagining what it would’ve be like had she been trapped there longer – as so many other travellers were.

The earthquake is conspicuous in its absence from Murakami’s short story collection After the Quake. I found a psychological/structuralist reading of the text to be most helpful, and read the earthquake as symbolic of the protagonists’ most prescient personal issues that each had hitherto been afraid to confront. In ‘UFO in Kushiro’, after sitting silently in front of television reports of the Kobe disaster for three days straight, Komura’s wife leaves him. As explanation she writes him a note that includes a line which baffles and haunts him: “Living with you is like living with a chunk of air.” The rest of the story plays out like a modern-day fable of self-discovery as Komura finds himself journeying with a box of contents unknown to him (but which he suspects is air) to present to a stranger in an unknown city. When another character suggests sarcastically that the box contains the nothingness within himself which his wife spoke of, Komura reacts with disproportionate violence. This incident forces him to face his feelings of worthlessness and helplessness since his wife’s ‘unwarranted’ departure. For him her leaving him is unwarranted. The only trigger he can pinpoint for her breakdown – logically, and needfully for his sanity – is the earthquake. But as he can’t reasonably hold the quake responsible for her falling out of love with him, it is inevitable that he face the possibility that their union was inadequate through their own failings.

‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ is a more surreal tale. It’s an account of a melancholy worker named Katagiri, who appears to be at least passively suicidal. Katagiri is a middle aged bachelor who works for a bank in Shinjuku. He considers himself to be underwhelming in every respect – especially in comparison to his younger brother and sister (whose college fees he paid) who have families of their own. Katagiri returns home from work to find a giant frog in his kitchen who tells him he must save Tokyo from a greater earthquake than the one that hit Kobe the previous week. In order to prevent it, Frog must go into battle with Worm (a giant worm who slumbers under Tokyo) who plans to cause the quake. Frog informs Katagiri that though he can be of no physical help to Frog, Katagiri can use his selfless nature to egg Frog on in the mortal fight. The protagonist, or hero, manages to save the day, and thus overcomes his inferiority complex. However his victory is questionable as it is achieved by his subconscious as he dreams of Frog and Worm’s encounter, suggesting that his life will continue to disappoint him in the real world.

*Kiwi Experience: popular coach tour of New Zealand amongst backpackers, including options to do activities (such as canoeing; mountain climbing; black, and white water rafting; horse trekking; bungee jumping; skydiving; quad biking), scenic walks, and learn about Maori culture. Our package covered both the North and South islands: from Auckland to Christchurch.

There are definitely some bonuses to having my job, the most obvious being that I get to live in Japan for a year. The pay isn’t bad either, but the best perk of all is the amount of free time. Of the forty hours a week I spend in school I only spend 18 of them at the front of a classroom. Then you have to subtract the number of lessons that get cancelled due to monthly exams, sports day, having an hour-long assembly to cheer on the baseball team, and numerous other things.

All in all this leaves a lot of time for me to while away at my desk in the massive teachers’ office I share with forty other members of staff. There are plenty of ways of doing this. Even after I’ve finished planning whatever I need for the weeks classes there’s still time to devote to studying Japanese, however difficult this seems to persist in being. There’s also the highly skilled activity of staring blankly into space. And sometimes it’s fun to have a few minutes gossiping and giggling with the young English teacher who sits next to me, whilst we munch our way through the enormous store of chocolate she keeps in her desk. But I’ve spent a lot of time working my way through as many novels as possible.

During a recent exam week lull I turned to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for some inspiring school-time reading. I adore Capote’s writing style and I couldn’t stop myself from racing through the pages. Being in the teachers’ office, however, guarantees anything but quiet reading time. Between classes the students wander around, coming in to speak to the teachers about a myriad of things, most of which I have absolutely no idea about. They come over calling for ‘our Kimu’ to try out a few English sentences on me. This usually ends in them asking for candy from the prize box or telling me the Kimono-wearing Hello Kitty toy I have sitting on my desk is ‘kawaii’ (‘cute’ in English).

But reading a novel about murder most foul when I have curious students and fluent English speaking colleagues around makes me feel nervous. Does choosing to read about death somehow make me seem a bit odd? Japan can be surprisingly straight-laced at times, and I don’t want to become the English girl who likes hearing about murders. I am engrossed in reading the gory details of the murders of the innocent Clutter family when I become aware of one of the students who has shuffled up silently behind me, peering quizzically at the (I hope) indecipherable text on the page in front of me.

Capote’s thriller is proof that knowing the ending doesn’t necessarily spoil your enjoyment of a story. From the outset we know that almost all the characters we are introduced to will meet their demise at the hands of another human, but it’s hearing their stories that’s the pleasure. Still Capote complies with a thrilling ending, leaving out the details of what exactly happened on the remote farm house one cold winter night until the very end of his twisting narrative. Perhaps my discomfort in reading the novel is partly what Capote set out to achieve; to create victims and killers who elicit your sympathy.

The idea that a popular and respected family could be unwittingly the target for two criminals unknown to them leaves you looking over your shoulder. Even when you’re perfectly certain that the only person behind you is a fifteen year old girl with multi-coloured fingernails and a pink clip in her hair, who is interested in everything that the English girl does, eats and reads, the novel makes you nervous. Suddenly I find that I have way too much time to think.

By Kimberley Long

‘Call me Ishmael’. I read the first line of Moby Dick as I packed it into my carry-on luggage. It’s one of those iconic first lines, like the opening to Rebecca. It jumps from the page and drags you inside. The character instructs us to call him Ishmael, but we know nothing about him; it may not even be a name he has used until that moment. And for me not knowing is the way it had to remain. Despite all my excitement at reading this marvelous-looking book, real life intervened. When it comes to Moby Dick, I have nothing to review.

The reason for this is that every May in Japan several public holidays fall together to create the wondrous, and fantastically named, Golden Week. It’s the perfect opportunity to travel while taking the minimum of paid leave. A mass exodus of language teachers ensues as we spread far and wide to explore what everything that the right hand side of the world map has to offer. I was off to spend my Golden Week holiday as a slightly prolonged Golden Fortnight in Australia. While I had every intention of coming back with tales of my own adventure against the backdrop of Melville’s masterpiece, I was having too much fun to get around to reading it.

I had a lot of travel time between planes and coach journeys, and thought the book would be there to help me pass these tedious hours. But in the end I spent my journeys people watching, and spying on what everyone else was reading. It seems that short but powerful reads are the mainstay of the gap year travellers, with sightings of various Orwells and Kerouac’s On the Road while taking the tram around Melbourne. Even the ditzy blonde I was sharing my hostel dorm with one night in Sydney preferred an evening in with Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to coming out partying with me and some university friends. All of this analysis of other people’s reading wasn’t getting me on the hunt of that elusive whale though.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read it. I searched for time in Sydney but was distracted by the pure white sails of the opera house and the intrepid types scaling the Harbour Bridge. Three jam packed days of sightseeing in Melbourne saw encounters with wombats, koalas, and even a particularly aggressive kangaroo that decided to grab my arm and not let go. But no sightings of any whales, physical or otherwise. Travelling alone is a surprisingly social experience. It’s almost impossible to get a moment to yourself as there’s always someone who wants you to go drink, eat, or play pool. Saying you want a quiet night in with a good book is rarely an option.

So the days passed and I still hadn’t done any reading. I did once pull the book from my bag somewhere on a twelve hour journey between Sydney and Melbourne, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Compared with watching the scenery whiz past in a blur of golden earth and bush contrasted against cloudless blue skies, hiding from my adventure inside the foxed pages of a 150 year-old novel seemed absurd.

I suppose in some ways this is the absolute antithesis of a review, but I think it’s really just a reminder of what we sometimes forget: that as great an experience as reading is, the adventure around you is often more compelling than what’s happening on the page. The book is currently lying unread with a pile of paper and my open, overflowing diary stacked on top of it next to my laptop. The manga sticker I was using for a bookmark is still jutting out of the top of the first page. And the man called Ishmael still has his story to tell.

By Kimberley Long

[Editor's Note: If you now feel you would really quite like to read about Moby Dick, click here to read an excitable recommendation that was published in The Reader magazine, issue 15, back in 2004. Buy back issues, single copies, and subscriptions to the magazine here.]

In a country that loves all things cute, the little blonde girl who chases after a rabbit was bound to win fans. Showing the students a picture of me in Alice fancy dress from my friend’s twenty-first birthday, coupled with my hair which has turned blonde since I got here, has earned me the nickname of ‘Alice’ amongst some of my kids, or ‘Arisu’ as they pronounce it. Actually Aoi, one of my English speaking geniuses in 3-F class, refers to me as ‘our Alice’, which breaks my heart whenever she says it. With a large collection of Alice-related stationery in school I have embraced the Alice fixation, and at least in this small corner of Japan, become part of it. So it was with a newly acquired copy of Alice in hand I that I set off for a long weekend visit to Osaka.

I wasn’t long into my journey before the Alice iconography to appear. Japan is indeed obsessed with Carroll’s terribly English little girl. Sitting on the Sonic train I had to take to the Shinkansen station I noticed that it had it’s name, the ‘Wonderland Express’, laid into the laminate flooring. Even the super punctual JR Railway service has been taken in by her charm. I really was being taken on my own journey down the rabbit hole.

The Shinkansen, the world famous Bullet Train, hurtled me into Osaka just as I was reading of Alice’s first meetings with the Duchess, and the pig and the pepper. The residents of Osaka are apparently the fastest walkers in the whole of Japan, as I experienced when I was jostled from the train to join the throngs of people in their own private Caucus race, heading off in every direction to be immersed into the concrete labyrinth.

Going from small town Beppu to Osaka was being transported to another world. Osaka is the image of the country that simply saying the word ‘Japan’ evokes. Buildings tower above your head for twenty stories and more and Shinsaibashi is a maze of bustle and commerce where tourist shops and foreign designer boutiques jostle for your attention alongside traditional crafts and deafening Pachinko parlours. Along the river giant neon signs dominate, garish and mesmerising for unknown products in a language I don’t really understand. Giant faces stare down, tempting you into buying a new camera or TV. I stand to watch a gigantic mechanical crab as it slowly attempts to scale a building. Despite all its best efforts, it doesn’t appear to be getting very far.

In the centre of the chaos stands Osaka castle. A serenity and silence hangs over the castle and its grounds where Buddhist monks stand as rigid and silent as ivory chess pieces around the castle grounds. Despite a highly eventful history the castle is at present not presided over by the tyrannical Queen. Not a single cry of ‘Off with his head!’ was to be heard in the two hours I spent wandering amongst the excited hoards of school children and of middle aged women practising Tai Chi under the trees.

As I sped away from Osaka on the Shinkansen again at the end of my weekend the glaring lights of the city soon reduced to tiny spots in the inky evening light. Over the next couple of hours the cities I passed through grew smaller as I was returned to real life again in my quiet town. While Beppu lacks the grandeur of Osaka’s dreamlike wonderland, it was good to be back home amongst people for whom I am glad to be ‘their Alice’.

___

Kimberley Long is a former Reader volunteer who is currently teaching English in Japan.

After making my way through the books I brought with me and the ones I’ve been lent since I got here, I finally got around to raiding the books that were left to me by my predecessor. I was intrigued by Reading Lolita in Tehran from the moment I saw it on my shelf, so homed straight in on that. It is one of those books that seem to follow me about. Past examples of ‘stalker’ books include Anna Karenina and Wuthering Heights. Reading Lolita in Tehran was the same. Whenever I went into bookshops it would be piled up on big tables by the door, along with whatever other titles the managers thought would grab the attention of the passers by. And time and again when I logged onto Amazon it would be listed under their recommendations to me. So when I turn up in Japan and it just happens to be on my shelf I knew the time had come.

I began the book by believing that I could empathise with what was happening. Focusing on the restrictions placed on women living under strict Islamic law I thought I could generalise the points made to how all women are suppressed in a patriarchal society. And from my personal point of view I had ideas of incorporating the obstacles I have faced in Japan, being a racial minority here and living in a very male-dominated society. The more I read however the more I realised that nothing I have ever experienced has ever come close to the boundaries these women are walled in by. After about sixty pages I felt physically exhausted. I had to engage all of my mental and physical capacities to change my outlook and get into the minds and souls of these other young women; literature students just like me. I had to stop several time mid page to pause and catch my breath as my head swam with questions and ideas.

In the course of my research into the book I found that it’s come up for criticism as essentially creating fuel for anti-Islamic sentiment in the West. While I can appreciate that to some it could appear that way from my perspective I felt it to be more balanced that expected. Azar Nafisi may well have chosen to leave Iran and live in America, but in her assembled all-female group of literature students there are women who cover the entire spectrum of feeling, from those who are willing to risk everything to escape, to those who are proud of their religion and the way of life it brings. It certainly left me with many more questions about this society about which I know so little.

The book was also interesting in that it is in part a book of literary criticism. Nafisi is, after all, an academic in English literature and among other things she has also written on Nabokov. In fact in places I wished I had read the book when I was studying Modern American fiction in my final year at university as some of the points she makes on Lolita and The Great Gatsby would have helped me immensely with my exams.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of my youth and naivety, but reading the book really opened my mind to a way of life and thinking that is so frequently painted as being oppressive and even inferior to Western culture. While I’m not sure I could go along with the way of life in Iran as Nafisi describes it, I now at least have some insight into why it is this way, and can sympathise with those who have left or who long to do so. Because given all the opportunities and freedom I have in my life empathy is truly out of the question. Sympathy is all I can offer.

By Kimberley Long

For my Christmas visit home I chose a book that was recommended to me years ago. At school we were split into two classes to study literature. So while I was introduced to Brian Friel and Shakespeare’s sonnets, many of my friends studied Anthony and Cleopatra, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. It was Atwood who I finally found myself reading on my twelve hour flight back to Heathrow.

Alias Grace is, without a doubt, my friend Lauren’s favourite book, almost to the point of obsession. She has pestered me for years to read it, so when I told her last summer I had finally got around to buying it she went all glassy-eyed and stared into the middle distance. Atwood seems to have a mesmerising effect on people. I studied The Blind Assassin in my first year at university and witnessed the effect of Atwood again then. Four years on and a large number of my course mates will still list this book as one of their all time favourites. So I was excited when I pulled the book from my hand luggage and curled up to read the best I could in my cramped economy class seat.

Despite spending a whole day flying home and back it wasn’t enough even to get half way through the novel. Alias Grace isn’t a short book, but nor is it Les Miserables or War and Peace. Still it took me the full month of January to finish reading it. This is not meant as a criticism. If I really love a book I will read it in short chunks at a time, maybe only a chapter a day, hoping to prolong the experience for as long as possible. During the summer I read a six hundred page modern crime novel (which shall remain nameless) in four days because I disliked it so much. Once I’ve started reading a novel, regardless of how much I dislike it, I have to know what happens. So I will plough through it to get it out of my life again as soon as is possible. Alias Grace by comparison  was to be savoured and lingered over.

My favourite thing about Atwood is the responsibility she places on the reader. When you open a novel you instantly place all your trust in the narrator, whether the protagonist, an observer, or an omniscient being kindly chronicling the tale for our benefit. With Atwood however this trust is slowly unravelled. She creates narratives where you are encouraged to question everything that takes place. Can the narrator be trusted? How significant are certain events really to the story? Is Grace insane, or cold and calculating to the point of total unfeeling? Does Mary Whitney really have such a massive influence on Grace’s life? And the most interesting point for me; does Jeremiah the Peddler really return under different guises?

And I know this is the biggest faux pas in the world of literature, but I was drawn to the cover. I couldn’t help but be intrigued by a novel that, regardless of its country of publication, features a drawing of Pre-Raphaelite model and wife of Dante Rosetti, Elizabeth Siddal.

For anyone who has never read anything by Atwood before I implore you to try her. She is certainly the author who has been recommended to me most often and her work repays careful reading. Atwood’s novels are also a marvellously productive and challenging way of passing time on ridiculously long trans-continental flights.

–By Kimberley Long

One thing I’ve discovered since I came to Japan is just how abysmal my geography and world history is. Like many Brits I was complacent about it because of my built-in knowledge of Europe; I can find my way around a map of Europe blindfolded and know all about Germany’s GNP prior to the Second World War thanks to A-Level history. But beyond this I have come to realise how much I don’t know. I never knew how close Japan was to Korea, or how far from Australia New Zealand is before I came here. And this is before I even begin to ponder how much I don’t know about world history. When you have friends from South Africa who mention people speaking Dutch in their part of the world and all you can do is smile and nod, it’s time to get reading.

So lately I’ve been devoting some time to changing this. After one of the history teachers in my school had a conversation with me about the attack of the Spanish Armada and Elizabethan history I had to admit I knew nothing of Japanese history. So I hunted out a guide to Japan my friend lent me not long after I arrived to brush up on my emperors and shoguns. Richard Tamses’ Japan from A Traveller’s History series may not be the most in depth study into Japan and its society but it provides a good starting point for someone who knows nothing of the country’s past. The same is true of my knowledge of everything American. A hunt around the staffroom in school uncovered a treasure trove of materials left by past generations of ALTs, amongst which was a brief guide to American history and one of American geography. These are little more than pamphlets that are given out by the American embassy but at least I can now say that I know some of the differences between New Hampshire and New Mexico, and the geographical features in between.

When I moved into my apartment one of the books of my shelf was Niall Ferguson’s Empire. Yes, I know this is a book on British history. The Empire however is a side of British history that generally isn’t taught at school; and at least not to me anyway. Taught British history generally focuses on what took place on the “scepter’d isle” itself, with some passing references to the sun never setting on the British Empire. Just where that was and when was something that completely eluded me.

Ferguson’s book gives an outline on how Britain helped to shape the modern world, but also gives a good insight into how these countries then went on and became independent nations in their own right after British rule. It’s especially interesting for me to think about how this helped the spread of English around the world and indirectly resulted in me being in Japan teaching what is perceived to be the world’s most international language.

Thinking about the British Empire and how Britain needed to colonize the large parts of the world to achieve greatness it really makes you wonder just how Japan managed to become the world power it is. This is a country whose territory over last millennium has covered little more than four small islands. Yet despite doing a great deal of its trade with the West it has somehow avoided becoming fully Westernized. Rather, it is a major economic and cultural power in its own right and one of the most technologically advanced places on earth. I suppose I’ll just have to do some more reading to find the answer.

Posted by Kimberley Long