If You Follow Me: A Novel

I enjoyed the first half more than the second, but it all came together well in the end. An interesting read and enjoyable, though disappointing in some ways and could have definitely been shortened in places.

Marina is in her early 20's, in a new relationship with Carolyn, and at the start of a one-year ESL teaching obligation in a small city in Northwestern Japan. Recently graduated from college, Marina is also overcoming the loss of her father by suicide. She had met Carolyn in a grief group at college. This book is an excellent study in the inner monologue of a person who is nearing the end of emotional adolescents (something I believe is almost uniquely American), and trying to anchor herself in the world as an actualized being. If you're looking for a dramatic plot or how the character learns and grows by being thrown into a culture where she is foreign and is forced to reevaluate her own upbringing, this isn't it. All in all, not too much happens in this book. We sort of just ride shotgun in a year in Marina's life. Over the year, a few predictable things happen: she brings in her American identity and flaunts in the face of her Japanese students, her relationship with Carolyn fizzles out, and she figures out that just because she didn't grieve with mass hysteria like so many wanted her to, doesn't mean she's not dealt with her father's suicide. Over all, not a bad read, but one I definitely wouldn't have undertaken had I not been required to read it. It won't appeal to those who need a good, clear conflict-resolution plot, but might be good for those who just enjoy studying how others think.

I really loved this book. The author's voice is both literary and modern, making for characters that are both well spoken when they need to be, and wonderfully at a loss for words sometimes as well. The story revolves around a very young lesbian couple who move to Japan to teach English for a year, and focuses on how the two grow and change over the year. Marina is the main character, and most of the book takes place from her point of view. Marina's father committed suicide a year earlier, and she and girlfriend Carolyn met in grief counseling. Marina agrees to move to Japan because she counts on Carolyn for stability, and wants to run from her problems at home. The experiences she has with the Japanese people help her to grow through and confront her grief, allowing her to move on with her life able to rely on herself for stability. This book is beautiful, heartbreaking and super funny by turns, and even the reader will feel a bit of culture shock as Marina learns the rules of her new country. There is a generous smattering of Japanese language in this book as well, and I found myself able to start reading some of it without needing definitions after a while. That was an added bonus, since I love Japanese. :) Give this one a shot if you love reading about Japanese culture, want a smooth modern love story without the overly done tones of a true romance novel, or if you like to read coming of age stories. :)

Beautifully written first novel of Marina, just out of college, who decides to teach English in rural Japan with her girlfriend, Carolyn, just after her father has committed suicide.Well written with about the confusion over the archaic Japanese systems (esp. garbage) and the repression in the school system with bullying, teaching certain subjects, and the distant manner of the people.

Marina is twenty-two, living in rural Japan, and teaching English in a vocational university. She moved to Japan with her girlfriend Carolyn, in part to escape her grief over her father's suicide. But living in the midst of such a foreign culture, bottling her emotions up so tightly, and hiding the actual nature of her relationship with Carolyn makes for a stressful and eventful year. The novel opens with a letter to Marina from her supervisor Miyoshi-sensei trying to explain to her the importance of the elaborate and confusing gomi (trash) disposal rules in rural Shika and her neighbors' unhappiness at her inability to follow these rules. Throughout the year, Marina continues to receive these letters from her supervisor, both chastizing her and illuminating the Japanese character.Marina's experience teaching is not at all what she expected and her relationship with Carolyn struggles and undergoes a major shift during this year abroad. Marina's students run the gamut from girls studying to become secretaries and oblivious to the accepted marginalization of women that surrounds them, to cock-sure boys destined to work at gas stations and in factories who harrass Marina and Miyoshi-sensei, to a silent and sullen former shut-in. She finds the majority of her interaction with the Japanese in town to be superficial, suffering disappointment whenever she thinks she's making a friend and discovering that said new friend only wants free English conversation. So the fact that she and Miyoshi-sensei develop a friendship is all the more valuable, until a strain threatens to eliminate this source of comfort for Marina. Meanwhile, being each other's only friend and companion is proving to be too much for Marina and Carolyn's relatively new relationship as they find themselves sinking under the combined weights of homesickness, loneliness, and grief.Absurdities, humor, disturbing events and characters, and quirks, cultural and personal, abound in this novel. While the entire year covered in the book is narrated by Marina, the other characters do come off as fully-rounded as her understanding of them allows them to be. The conceit of using Miyoshi-sensei's letters to Marina to insert interesting cultural tidbits about Japan that otherwise would seem out of place, is well done and creative. Isolation as a major theme is handled well, with Marina's internalized feelings accurately reflected by her external circumstances: grief and aloneness reflected in her failing relationship and in her cultural isolation. Watrous has drawn a vivid picture of a small corner of Japan and although it is a picture that entices me to visit Japan not at all, I still appreciate the insight into the culture. More than the story of a young woman traveling part way around the world to find herself amidst a completely different culture, this plumbs the depths of love, life, and community.

The Short of It:Reading If You Follow Me, is like taking a cool sip of water on a hot summer’s day. It’s refreshing and bold and filled with vivid, colorful characters.The Rest of It:I was rather surprised by this one. I expected it to be a “fish out of water” story, and to a degree, it is but there’s much more to it than you would expect. It’s light and airy in one sense, but it deals with some heavier themes and Watrous manages to take all of these elements and roll them into a nice little package.Marina is an American who is hired to teach English in the small, Japanese town of Shika. She, along with her girlfriend, Carolyn, inhabit a tiny apartment and run into all sorts of colorful neighbors. Neighbors that constantly sift through her trash and complain to her supervisor, Hiro, also known as Miyoshi-sensei, about her constant rudeness.Through letters, Hiro teaches Marina about the finer points of living in a small, Japanese town. These letters are peppered throughout the novel and are quite funny.Here’s an example:"Now I prepare this sheet so you can learn target Japanese words and gomi law in one simple occasion. I hope it’s so convenient for you. It’s kind of so rude if you “can’t remember” about gomi law. Your neighbors feel some stress about you, and they must be so busy. They can’t talk to you every time you make a gomi mistake. I think they want to know you so much. First learn gomi law, second Japanese language, and third you can enjoy international friendship. This is like holding hands across the sea!"There are many humorous moments within this novel which sort of lighten it up a bit, but at the core, Marina is struggling to deal with her father’s suicide and the feeling that perhaps she could have prevented it. The guilt that she has over the incident is a constant presence throughout the novel. It sits quietly in the background as she tries to sort through the life that she has chosen for herself.Her interactions with others are almost in slow motion. She sort of drifts through her days going from classroom to classroom and is often in denial when it comes to the current state of things. Marina is a strong woman though, and when she feels the need to act, she does and you end up in her corner, cheering her on.I can’t say enough about the characters. They’re all quirky and different and although some of them are only referred to in a line or two, you still get a feeling for who they are. Watrous has a knack for carving out the essence of a character without weighing them down with a lot of background info.There’s so much here to like. If you enjoy quirky, fun novels that have a bit of substance to them, you will enjoy If You Follow Me.

When twenty-two year old Marina arrives in rural Japan to teach English, she brings along her girlfriend Carolyn and a tremendous amount of emotional baggage that she has been carrying since her father committed suicide. She soon comes to discover that living in rural Japan is a lesson in contradiction and strangeness. First off, there are the massively restrictive gomi-rules which require her to obsessively monitor her trash output, a feat which she can never seem to manage no matter how the locals scold her. Then there is the teaching job itself, in a school where real educational instruction seems to be put on the back burner in favor of technical advice and socializing. Lastly are the strange relationships that she shares with the local people, people who offer a strange kind of friendship tinged heavily with reprimand and advice. Though Marina and Carolyn are keeping their relationship status a secret from the locals, they are beginning to have an increasing amount of quarrels, leaving them ostracized from each other and the people surrounding them. Marina is also having issues with her supervisor and friend Hiro, a man who takes it upon himself to write her admonishing letters about the gomi situation and who seems to take a special interest in her personal affairs. As Marina navigates her way through the ever-changing strangeness of Japan, she discovers her true feelings about her father's death and her relationship with Carolyn, and comes to find her place in a very different and unintentionally hilarious new society.I really loved this candid and thoughtful little book. Through her use of a dry style of comedy, Watrous is able to capture the eccentricities of rural Japan and its inhabitants in some really clever ways. Though the book was at times bittersweet, I felt that overall the story was told with a great amount of irreverence and originality, and it kept me entwined in the narrative circle throughout the whole experience.I really liked Marina, and her confusion over the aspects of her life made her a very winsome character. She had so many issues in Japan, from the ever-growing tension of her hidden relationship to her trials with the local community and the strange camaraderie between Hiro-san and herself. She never felt sorry for herself though, which made me like her even more. She was at times very put upon, not really understanding where she fit in the society that she had been placed in, but she wasn't aloof and unfeeling in her adventures. I think some of the best parts of the book were the original reactions that Marina had to her surroundings and neighbors, her wonder and perplexity finished over with a cool veneer of acceptance and toleration. I felt bad that she had so many gomi problems as well, for that seemed to be her biggest battle. It was really funny to see the way the neighbors and Hiro-san kept returning the trash to their house after a wrong attempt had been made at disposal. The Japanese in this story were completely engrossed with their garbage and the potential recycling of the same. I thought there was a lot of symbolism in Marina's struggle with the trash. In a way it mirrored the struggles she was having with her unbidden emotions, and she was ever trying to put both the trash and her feelings into their proper perspectives and places.Marina's relationship with Carolyn was fraught with tension throughout most of the narrative. It seemed that both of the women were emotionally bouncing off one another all the time, and the pressure of keeping their relationship a secret made them both act out in different ways. By being so clandestine, they really isolated themselves, and each other in the strictures of silence and acceptability. I thought that Carolyn could be almost a little emotionally abusive at times, for she was so cold and alienating towards Marina, and I was almost hoping that their relationship would come to a swift end. It didn't seem like they really fit together very well. They had different interests and different ways of showing emotion, and I thought that at times, Carolyn was a weight around Marina's neck that she would be better off without. Their relationship, fostered by the aftermath of tragedy was almost damaging to both of them, so I was glad that there was a bit of a resolution to their woes about each other.One of the best things about this book was the way that it highlighted Marina's attempts at friendship with the local Japanese people. Marina was so different from them, and it took a long time for her to be able to really mesh with them, both in her personal and professional life. She had a very accepting view of the Japanese, and formed all different kinds of relationships from crushes to friendships to colleague-type relationships. The Japanese were very accepting of her, though they never lost an opportunity to try to guide her more correctly down her path. Her relationship with Hiro-san was, I think, my favorite part of the book. He takes a liking to writing her warning letters about her gomi infractions, but what first appears to be criticizing becomes the basis of a very deep and moving friendship that gave the plot of this book a winning edge.As Marina comes to understand rural Japan, she also comes to deal with the tragedy of her father's death. There are some very insightful and emotional scenes of Marina's struggle to accept the fact of what her father has done and there is a lot of depth to her character and her actions. Her conflicting feelings about her father go very far in explaining her strange relationship with Carolyn and her desire to move half way across the world to teach in Japan. In running away from her home to Japan, she has outrun the devastation of what her father had done, and it is only natural that she must move through her strange notions of grief to obtain some kind of peace in her life. I felt very sympathetic of Marina's situation. She seemed lost most of the time, just going through the motions to fit in, but underneath there was a growing tidal wave of anger and confusion running through her.I must also mention that this book is extremely funny. Most of the humor comes in the strangeness of everyday situations. As a Westerner, I felt that Watrous really captured the absurdity that one can feel being surrounded by people who are so different from you, yet strangely the same. The social customs of the people that surrounded Marina, along with their perplexing love of garbage, provided a lot of comic relief to the story, which I feel would have been too maudlin without it. As it was, there was a perfect balance between the odd and the tragic, making the book seem weighty yet somehow emotionally uncluttered.I think that those readers who like unusual stories or stories about Americans on foreign soil would do well to pick up this book. It was a tremendously engrossing read and was not predictable in the least. If you gravitate towards humor with a literary bent, this book would be perfect for you as well. It was a fun read and one that didn't bombard you with its messages, though it did have them. In the back section of the book, there are some great interviews with the author in which she writes about her own strange experiences in rural Japan as well as highlights a few of her favorite books about the area. I really liked these sections and thought that they were a welcome addition to the book. I do think that this book would appeal to lots of different readers, so I urge you to give it a shot. I doubt you will be disappointed!

**Disclaimer: I know the author. If You Follow Me is the story of 22-year-old Marina who graduates from college and heads off to Japan, with her new lesbian lover, to teach English. Marina is only beginning to deal with her father's recent suicide and what she discovers about herself -- and Japan -- is a wonderful tale full of sadness -- but also one full of laughter. This novel is head and shoulders above most of the popular fiction today: carefully crafted, beautifully imagined, peopled with fully realized characters.