American Fuji
by Sara Backer

Japan itself is the comic hero of this sweet and funny, sad and inspiring novel.

Gaby Stanton, an American professor living in Japan, has lost her job teaching English at Shizuyama University. (No one will tell her exactly why.) Alex Thorn, an American psychologist, is mourning his son, a Shizuyama exchange student who was killed in an accident. (No one will tell him exactly how.) Alex has come to this utterly foreign place to find the truth, and now Gaby is serving as his translator and guide. The key to mastering Japanese, she keeps telling him, is understanding what's not being said. And in this "deft and delightful" (Karen Joy Fowler) novel, the unsaid truths about everything from work and love to illness and death cast a deafening silence-and tower in the background like Mount Fuji itself.

I really enjoyed this novel of Japan. It's about an American psychologist, Alex Thorn, who is in Japan to find out what happened to his son, Cody, an exchange student at Shizuyama University, who was killed in an accident. Cody's body was shipped back to the States with no explanation as to what happened to him or who had paid any medical bills for him. All Alex had to go on was a bill from "Gone With the Wind" funeral services for shipment of the body. And when the body was received, it had had its heart surgically removed. So what had happened to Cody and why? Alex's quest leads him to Gaby Stanton, a professor who was fired from Shizuyama and is now working for "Gone With the Wind" selling extravagant fantasy funerals to older Japanese. Gaby insists that the funeral company did not ship the body back to the States and she has no knowledge of what happened. So Gaby ends up helping Alex get to the bottom of the mystery. This leads to finding that Cody may have met up with members of the Japanese mafia, the yakuza, which then leads to questions about the people Gaby is working for. And how does this all relate to her getting fired from the university and a somewhat questionable professor there? Gaby tells Alex to expect the unexpected and to try to understand what is not being said. As Alex is drawn to Gaby, she is reluctant to get into a relationship because of a medical condition which she feels keeps her as an outsider especially in the States.

I thought this novel really gave the reader a sense for life in Japan showing how the Japanese feel about Americans or gaijin and the many differences between the two cultures. The book also discusses the Japanese medical system which appears to be a universal system where all are treated without insurance. This seemed very relevant to the debates going on in Congress about Medicare for all or a universal health care system in the U.S. The novel also contained many interesting characters that were well developed and added to the storyline. One of the most interesting was Mr. Eguchi, Gaby's boss at "Gone With the Wind", who could only communicate in English using Beatles lyrics. I have never spent time in Japan other than being stationed in Okinawa during the 70s which was very Americanized at the time. I will probably never get to go there so this book was a good substitute for a Japanese experience.

Sending to GoryDetails...a wishlist tag. Enjoy!

Thanks so much for the wishlist-tag book! The idea of culture-clash plus mysterious death plus "fantasy funeral" is what made me wish for the book in the first place; looking forward to reading it!

Later: I enjoyed this very much! Perryfran already described the plot, so I'll just add that I appreciated the culture-clash elements (and often wanted to throttle poor clueless Alex), loved the twists and turns, laughed aloud at a few points, and found the eventual resolution of the various puzzlements quite satisfying. (And I have to give the author points for featuring a main character who's suffering from chronic ulcerative colitis; this is not an ailment that gets a lot of time in fiction!)

I'm adding this book to the Already Been Crossed bookbox, which will be on its way to its next stop soon. Enjoy!

*** Released for the 2019 Keep Them Moving release challenge. ***

Removed from kaila-ann's Already Been Crossed Bookbox.