Audrey Hepburn's Neck, by Alan Brown
Alan Brown (four stars)
(Review posted 13 Dec 1999 12:12:12)

(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)

This is a very good book. The prose is fine, deeply sensuous, sometimes luminous.

"On Shiretoko Peninsula, laundry is carelessly left out overnight, clean sheets snapping in the dark wind. Here in Tokyo's gay bar district, though, neon signs are stacked one on top of another four stories high, and their bright colors bleed together in the rain like watercolors. Toshi and Paul walk past Marine Club, Kings of College, 69, Zip, Morning Tissue, Idol Host Snack Bar. Rain swirls around them like vapor. An umbrella, even if they had one, would offer no protection."

The characters are well-drawn, the settings feel real, the problems are authentic and involving. The length is perfect, and the scenes are well-chosen. While the writing is suffused with emotion, there is no hint of mawkishness. Endings are always hard; the resolution here is if anything too neat, too hopeful, too complete. But we all need an ending like that once in awhile, to remind us that sometimes people really do get their lives together and end up happy.

Nominally the book is about Japan, about a young Japanese man growing up, his relationship to foreignness and foreigners, to his past and his country's past. And it does that well. But I'm also reminded of Barthes's "Empire of Signs": using Japan to stand for the exotic, to take the reader out of the familiar, in order to talk about the wider universe. So part of the reason this book is so good, and that it doesn't matter that it's written by an Alan Brown rather than a Toshiyuki Okamoto, is that as well as telling us "this is what foreigners can be like, if you're Japanese", it also tells us "this is what the world can be like, if you're human".