It's No Crime: To Change Your Mind (Paperback)

The book is worth a read for its focus on the Japan that's off the beaten path. It doesn't go on about hyper-advanced electronics, overworked city dwellers having kinki sex after a round of karaoke, or the shenanigans going on between business leaders and politicians. Instead, his characters include very typical Japanese in workaday communities on Kyushu and Shikoku Islands as well as in Hyogo Prefecture. This is by no means a book that panders to European or American stereotypes of Japan.

Typical of first novels, the author sometimes supplies too much detail in his zeal to get things "right." On the other hand, the patiently crafted and keenly perceptive descriptions of daily Japan are just what I'd like a friend in the states to read for greater insight than the media typically provide. Things like how teacups are placed on a table ring much truer than the swashbuckling and slashing found in Hollywood hits.

The scenes set in Britain--especially an unexpected fight Jamie has with the feminazis at his graduate school--are hilarious, though a few local expressions baffled this American. The dialogs in Japan are peppered with Japanese, but with smoothly entwined explanations; in fact, this is one of the best efforts I've seen in a novel of dropping in key Japanese phrases and bits of dialog and still being completely clear to non-Japanese-speaking readers while not seeming contrived or throwing in a mini phrasebook...

To varying degrees, every long-time foreign resident here struggles with the relative feelings about Japan and his/her own country. Dean's treatment of Britain and various British characters seems a bit harsh, but he portrays Japan with good humor and compassion, well balanced between the foreign nuts who blame the country for ruining their lives and the foreign nuts who are more reverential to it than the boys in the right-wing paramilitary sound trucks. No work on Japan--fiction or non-fiction--is going to provide the definitive "real Japan", but John Dean looks at the country honestly and sincerely as someone who has adopted it as his home, settling neither for elaborate mythologizing or simplistic scorn. Jamie's, and John's, change of mind was certainly no crime.

Japan is presented as a real country and not just some exotic location to provide contrast with the UK. The main character actually returns to the UK about two-thirds of the way through the book just in time for the Miners Strike in 1984. This is a very powerful sequence. The incidents he records probably really happened.

I bought this book because I have met John Dean. I work in Japan and our paths have occasionally crossed. I thought the book wouldn't be much good but I was totally wrong about that. This is really good stuff. When he talks about Japan he tells it like it is. He produces a very fair and accurate description of what it is actually like when you come over here as a "gaijin" (foreigner) -- literally, an "outside person".