If You Follow Me: A Novel (P.S.)
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"A smart, comic first novel."--New York Times Book Review
Product Description
And so begins "If You Follow Me" and Marina's lessons in 'gomi' (garbage) law, Japanese culture, and the workings of Shika, the small, rural Japanese town in which she is teaching English for one year. For recent college grad Marina, Shika becomes more than just her home as a 'temporary person'. It's also an attempt to escape the bleak reality that has followed her every day since her father committed suicide only a year earlier. But as Marina comes to realise, in Japan, you can never really throw away your past. For a young woman who has fled to another country to try and outpace her grief, this comes to have a profound meaning. Part coming-of-age, part fish-out-of-water story, "If You Follow Me" is seeped in the tension of being the outsider in an intimate community and the joy in finding that human nature is the same everywhere. Marina is a big city girl in a small town filled with off-beat characters including an ambitious town matchmaker, a dentist looking for free English lessons, a high school student imitating Western rap artists with his own afro and addiction to self-tanning lotion, and finally Marina's America-obsessed supervisor, Hiro, a town leader whose connection with Marina teaches her more than she ever expected. In keeping with the Japanese tradition of honoring the seasons in art and writing, "If You Follow Me" is split into four sections: Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. Through each season, debut author Malena Watrous' gorgeous writing is on display as she guides readers over the cultural bridges her exquisitely drawn characters must cross to understand each other. "If You Follow Me" is a dark comedy of manners and ultimately a strange kind of love story that marks the beginning of a wonderful new career.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the kind of book that you want to hold on to for a long long time. The story is of a recent college graduate called Marina who finds herself following her lover to teach English in rural Japan. The story is intriguing and dark yet lightly humored, and it's definitely one to check out if you have any interest in teaching in Japan. The Japanese 'gomi' rules provide an amusing insight into the quirkiness of daily life.
Marina finds it difficult to fit in at first, but eventually you realise that the Japanese way is slowly seeping into her life. The book is split into the four seasons so you get to know and care about the characters over the course of a year. You end up rooting for certain people and hoping that they'll pull through.
I really loved the story from the beginning to the bittersweet end, and I highly recommend it.
Marina finds it difficult to fit in at first, but eventually you realise that the Japanese way is slowly seeping into her life. The book is split into the four seasons so you get to know and care about the characters over the course of a year. You end up rooting for certain people and hoping that they'll pull through.
I really loved the story from the beginning to the bittersweet end, and I highly recommend it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
14 reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
beautifully written tale of of a young foreign woman in a small Japanese town
22 Mar 2010
Format:Paperback
Great literature transcends its characters and plot and brings greater understanding and critical thought, and If You Follow Me is that kind of great literature. It's mostly the story of Marina, who is spending her first year out of college teaching college in rural Japan. She's still dealing with her father's suicide, and her girlfriend, Carolyn, is also teaching in Japan. They're the only foreigners in a small, rural town with a nuclear power plant. They live in the only apartment available for two people.
Watrous did an amazing job of translating the experience of teaching in rural Japan to the reader. The novel opens with the first of what will be many letters informing Marina of her violations of gomi law. The Japanese have a complex system of recycling, burning and disposing of their trash on different days, in different places and with different means. Instantly, I was as dumbfounded and embarrassed as Marina was for her inevitable and unintentional rudeness and violation of law. Perhaps the greatest cultural insults are the ones we commit when we don't even think to ask, such as how to sort our garbage.
Although the novel is told from Marina's point of view, it's brilliance is in the reader's ability to see the story not only through Marina's eyes, but also from the perspectives of the other characters, major and minor, and to truly understand each subtle moment from multiple sides. Many authors use multiple narrators to introduce readers to other points of view, but Watrous weaves language barriers, cultural misunderstanding and the human emotions beautifully into a coherent whole, and Marina still has a strong enough presence to feel like a friend from the novel's first pages. It's a testament to her skill as both a writer and a storyteller that this reader could so easily and quickly understand the perspective of those who have never ventured away from this small town in rural Japan.
Perhaps it's not a novel for everyone. It's not a sentimental tale of teaching English in a foreign land and bridging cultural gaps. It is, however, among the most honest and thoughtful novels I've read in a very long time. If you're a fan of language, cultural divides, and people watching, then you'll probably love it.
Watrous did an amazing job of translating the experience of teaching in rural Japan to the reader. The novel opens with the first of what will be many letters informing Marina of her violations of gomi law. The Japanese have a complex system of recycling, burning and disposing of their trash on different days, in different places and with different means. Instantly, I was as dumbfounded and embarrassed as Marina was for her inevitable and unintentional rudeness and violation of law. Perhaps the greatest cultural insults are the ones we commit when we don't even think to ask, such as how to sort our garbage.
Although the novel is told from Marina's point of view, it's brilliance is in the reader's ability to see the story not only through Marina's eyes, but also from the perspectives of the other characters, major and minor, and to truly understand each subtle moment from multiple sides. Many authors use multiple narrators to introduce readers to other points of view, but Watrous weaves language barriers, cultural misunderstanding and the human emotions beautifully into a coherent whole, and Marina still has a strong enough presence to feel like a friend from the novel's first pages. It's a testament to her skill as both a writer and a storyteller that this reader could so easily and quickly understand the perspective of those who have never ventured away from this small town in rural Japan.
Perhaps it's not a novel for everyone. It's not a sentimental tale of teaching English in a foreign land and bridging cultural gaps. It is, however, among the most honest and thoughtful novels I've read in a very long time. If you're a fan of language, cultural divides, and people watching, then you'll probably love it.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
A STORY OF COURAGE AND DISCOVERY
15 Mar 2010
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
In IF YOU FOLLOW ME, Watrous writes about people we all know; hers is a story of self discovery in which the reader shares. In many outsider novels, there is the 'other' and then there is the 'known.' In FOLLOW, there is no 'other.'
Though Watrous had me laughing so hard I dropped my book on several occasions, it was often a bittersweet kind of laughter - not "ha, ha, ha." Bittersweet because the writing is so honest. The character of the Japanese supervisor and English teacher is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. His "Japlish" letters are unconventional to say the least, but his affection for his students and for Marina in particular made me love him all the more. You'll meet other Japanese characters in FOLLOW that will seem more familiar than foreign - in particular a first grade boy whose relationship with his autistic brother is complicated but oh so human.
I ordered this book from Amazon this week and finished it almost overnight. I could not attend to anything else. It's that kind of story. Read it. You won't regret it.
Though Watrous had me laughing so hard I dropped my book on several occasions, it was often a bittersweet kind of laughter - not "ha, ha, ha." Bittersweet because the writing is so honest. The character of the Japanese supervisor and English teacher is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. His "Japlish" letters are unconventional to say the least, but his affection for his students and for Marina in particular made me love him all the more. You'll meet other Japanese characters in FOLLOW that will seem more familiar than foreign - in particular a first grade boy whose relationship with his autistic brother is complicated but oh so human.
I ordered this book from Amazon this week and finished it almost overnight. I could not attend to anything else. It's that kind of story. Read it. You won't regret it.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Hilarious and compelling debut
30 Mar 2010
Format:Paperback
I couldn't put this book down!
From the novel's very first letter detailing Miss Marina's culturally improper trash habits to its moving ending with the heroine alone by the sea, If You Follow Me takes the traditional novel of manners and turns it on its head. In many ways, Watrous' writing reminded me of a cross between Jane Austen and Edith Wharton: coincidence, misunderstandings, romance, and disguises abound. The dialogue is sharp and incredibly funny, and the characters are so real. And yet lurking beneath this well-executed, crowd-pleasing structure is a tremendous personal loss that gives the novel its depth, and puts Marina in the company of Countess Olenska and other literary heroines who face down tragedy.
I loved how recycling became a strangely apt metaphor for grief in the book, as Marina learns which things from the past she must throw away, and what will be incorporated into her new life. It's part of Watrous' noteworthy talent that she can take a mundane part of contemporary existence and illuminate it until it reflects back something we didn't know about ourselves. Looking forward to more by this author.
From the novel's very first letter detailing Miss Marina's culturally improper trash habits to its moving ending with the heroine alone by the sea, If You Follow Me takes the traditional novel of manners and turns it on its head. In many ways, Watrous' writing reminded me of a cross between Jane Austen and Edith Wharton: coincidence, misunderstandings, romance, and disguises abound. The dialogue is sharp and incredibly funny, and the characters are so real. And yet lurking beneath this well-executed, crowd-pleasing structure is a tremendous personal loss that gives the novel its depth, and puts Marina in the company of Countess Olenska and other literary heroines who face down tragedy.
I loved how recycling became a strangely apt metaphor for grief in the book, as Marina learns which things from the past she must throw away, and what will be incorporated into her new life. It's part of Watrous' noteworthy talent that she can take a mundane part of contemporary existence and illuminate it until it reflects back something we didn't know about ourselves. Looking forward to more by this author.
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