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Summary
Summary
Hoping to outpace her grief in the wake of her father's suicide, Marina has come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. But in Japan, as she soon discovers, you can never really throw away your past . . . or anything else, for that matter.
If You Follow Me is at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind of love story. Alive with vibrant and unforgettable characters--from an ambitious town matchmaker to a high school student-cum-rap artist wannabe with an addiction to self-tanning lotion--it guides readers over cultural bridges even as it celebrates the awkward, unlikely triumph of the human spirit.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Watrous's proficient debut, 22-year-old Marina and her girlfriend Carolyn are new residents in a quirky Japanese town where they teach English while learning their own lessons about gomi, or garbage disposal. Aside from the local obsession with trash, living in smalltown Shika is a welcome respite for Marina, who grapples with her father's suicide (he was indirectly responsible for her introduction to Carolyn; they met in a bereavement group), and although she hopes to move past his death during her year in Japan, he begins to feel more alive to her, as if his presence made the trip as well. Meanwhile, the peculiar absurdities of being a stranger in a strange land abound (how does one properly dispose of a refrigerator?), and though this tale of culture shock, growing up, and throwing out isn't especially distinguished from its fish-out-of-water peers, it does the trick as a diversion. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
HERE'S one idea for what not to do if you're young, unsure of yourself and burdened with unresolved grief: Take your mess to a foreign culture for a year and try to dump it there. Japan seems to be a particularly difficult place to sort yourself out if you are a sensitive, rules-averse American woman with a flexible sexuality and a penchant for getting into trouble, like the narrator of Malena Watrous's smart, comic first novel, "If You Follow Me." But fortunately for the rest of us, calamity borne with a good sense of humor often turns into a great story. The narrator, Marina, has agreed to teach English in rural Japan along with Carolyn, a woman from her college grief counseling group with whom she has fallen in love. Marina's father has recently committed suicide, and Marina, unmoored, thinks Carolyn's plan to head for Japan after graduation is as good as any. But changing places rarely solves problems, and each misstep through this formal and tradition-bound culture sinks Marina deeper into despair. She can't even throw her garbage out correctly, much less be honest about the relationship she arrived with. It's hard just to survive in a world where, she discovers, sexism rules and friends are hard to make, the village is overshadowed by a nuclear power plant, her appliances malfunction, her car gets smashed, pets die, food spoils, students rebel and her teeth hurt - all in a challenging language. In life as in grief, "there is always more," Marina discovers. Waves of error and misunderstanding move the plot swiftly forward. And because Watrous's narrator is not shy about making fun of herself, the novel's humor escalates with its complications - all of them tidily resolved: at the story's end no detail (and there are many) goes wasted. Some readers may be disappointed when the love affair with Carolyn, seemingly central at the start, turns out to be a bit of a bust, just another problem for Marina to survive in her messy year abroad. It would be a gratifying turn for Carolyn if she could end up happily ensconced with a new Japanese girlfriend. but sadly, she just sort of goes away. Marina, meanwhile, presses on to cross new-barriers, taking a risk for happiness with a man whose most obvious passion is for karaoke. But if Carolyn's story line fades, it is mostly because the real story here is thoroughly Marina's. There are moments when this novel reaches a level of intimacy close to that of memoir - especially when Marina (whose name stands out as an Asian-accented version of the author's) recalls her lost father. In these passages and elsewhere, Marina's interior life is vividly described. Yet the introspection about grief sometimes feels like a diversion. This novel, after all, is not fundamentally about loss. The more central theme is adaptation: to the new, to the strange, to oneself. And that story doesn't require more than a table-setting of personal history. Marina says she doesn't like questions with only one answer, and she doesn't like rules. But really, the problem is that she discovers rules only when she breaks them. In the end, attending a wedding with her former boss, Marina asks about the customs beforehand. After all, rushing in untutored may mean "committing a rude" she'll regret. This is what experience has taught her: Ascertain the rules first, and then ignore them. It's a small compromise to help an independent woman better navigate her world, making it a place where she can begin to feel at home. Lori Soderlind is the author of a memoir, "Chasing Montana: A Love Story."