At Home in Japan

March 22, 2010
“For almost three decades I have been the housewife, custodian, and chatelaine of a 350-year-old farmhouse in rural Japan,” writes Otowa in her informative and delightfully illustrated memoir. In 1978, American-born Otowa came to Japan as a university student, filled “with an exaggerated confidence in my paltry store of knowledge, undercut with a pervading suspicion that I didn't know as much as I thought I did.” Four years later she married into a traditional Japanese family. The short but engaging chapters (none is longer than four pages) explore one aspect of her adopted life. But like any good essayist, Otowa wanders into wider country. In “Comfort,” she recounts the snuggly family comforts obtained from the continued use of the traditional kotatsu, a “low table with a blanket or quilt spread over it and a heating device inside.” In “Sweets,” she delves into the complex obligations attached to the “painstakingly shaped, delicately colored, beautifully presented and ritually consumed edible forms.” And in “Bamboo,” Otowa reveals the special spot, “exotic as a unicorn, and as common as mud,” the plant holds in her heart. Filled with personal insights garnered from years spent learning to fit into a radically different culture, Otowa gently illuminates what it means to discover your identity in a foreign land.

February 1, 2010
This wonderful emic work offers readers a rare look into the life of a foreigneror "gaijin" in Japaneseliving in a rural village outside of the storied and ancient city of Kyoto, Japan. The book is a meditation on the author's experiences, beginning in 1981, addressing the many themes and tensions of living in a foreign country, including the different language and traditions, as well as more universal struggles such as those between the capricious and the elderly, men and women, and society and the individual. These issues are set against the backdrop of a magnificent Japanese farmhouse that the author and her husband inherited and that has been in the husband's family since the 1600s. The book is divided into short, themed chapters focusing on seasonal events, village happenings, and personal triumphs and failuresthe house itself even has a chapter written from its own historical perspective. This book can easily rest alongside Margaret Mead's "The Chrysanthemum and the Rose" as an examination of Japanese culture. VERDICT Anyone interested in knowing what it is like to become fully immersed in another cultureyet always as an outsiderwill enjoy this thoughtful account immensely.Poppy Johnson-Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll. Lib., Tucumeari, NM

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