Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures

by Kyoko Mori

In this powerful, exquisitely crafted book, Kyoko Mori delves into her dual heritage with a rare honesty that is both graceful and stirring. From her unhappy childhood in Japan, weighted by a troubled family and a constricting culture, to the American Midwest, where she found herself free to speak as a strong-minded independent woman, though still an outsider, Mori explores the different codes of silence, deference, and expression that govern Japanese and American women's lives: the ties that bind us to family and the lies that keep us apart; the rituals of mourning that give us the courage to accept death; the images of the body that make sex seem foreign to Japanese women and second nature to Americans. In the sensitive hands of this compelling writer, one woman's life becomes the mirror of two profoundly different societies.

Genres: Japan, Memoir, Nonfiction, Asian Literature, Asian American, Biography, Feminism

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Kyoko Mori was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1957. As a young girl, she learned numerous ways to be creative, including drawing, sewing, and writing, from her mother and her mother's family. From those family members, Mori says, "I came to understand the magic of transformation — a limitless possibility of turning nothing into something."

Mori's life changed completely at age 12, when her mother died. Her father remarried one year later, but the household was not a happy one, and Mori looked for ways to stay away from home. Eventually, she moved to the United States to attend college. She then went to graduate school, where she studied creative writing.

Mori's writing grows out of her personal experiences, but she doesn't always write exactly what happens in her own life. "I think that the best thing about being a writer is that we get to make up things and tell the truth at the same time," she says. Since she received her doctoral degree in 1984, Mori has taught creative writing and has published fiction, poetry, and essays.

Reviews

[Daniel Clausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Kyoko Mori's commitment to honesty, even when that meant blackening the eyes of people in her family. I don’t always approve of this kind of behavior. Hemingway did it with people in his life. The book is about rejecting polite lies for the sake of honesty. Honesty can be a release. It can be freedom, but it always comes with a price. Honesty is also destructive…it lays bare the cruelty of the world and the corruption that eats at our relationships. Polite lies can be our defense against barbarity. Polite lies help us stomach the world.

I empathized deeply with many of the themes of this book. It's always seemed true to me that our childhood traumas never go away. We take them into adulthood with us and they form what kind of adults we are. As I was reading this book, it seemed to me that Kyoko Mori was also trying to make her mother speak. She was struggling to give her a voice that she never had...It also seemed as if she wanted to permanently silence her father. This seemed a bit cruel, but this cruelty is born from an honest loathing. I can empathize with that loathing. The character of her father comes off as a cheap parody of paternalism and patriarchy – and yet as a cheap parody of paternalism and patriarchy, I can see this character clearly (I tried to write this character, the character named Chuck, in my own novel, The Ghosts of Nagasaki). Japan isn't the only world where destructive patriarchy rules.

The world sees little more than a winner, a benign petty king or diamyo, a leader bearing terrible burdens. Meanwhile, his male privilege leads him to cheat on his wife, cheat on his girlfriend, neglect his children and beat his daughter. And now, by airing these grievances out publicly, by saying in her most honest moment that you, father, are nothing but patriarchal stereotype and buffoon, she is having her revenge. I’m sure it was tough to be Chuck…I mean whatever the dad’s name was…they're all used car salesmen and petty bullshit artists named Chuck in my mind...long hours at the office, being friendly with all those clients…and it wasn’t his fault that he was born into a man’s world where that was how the game was played, a jovial laugh for every unfunny joke, and a mandatory slap on the butt of the nearest waitress (How else were you supposed to succeed?)…he just played the game better than most…and yet still, let the caricature die…kill the paternalist stereotype if you have to, let it choke on its own excess, as it eats up the vomit of its own exaggeration. Could she have written the character of her father more sympathetically? Maybe, but why...we see now more than ever that it is exactly how it's written. The stereotype just gets worse with each grotesque iteration.

Everyone’s story deserves to be heard. Everyone has a perspective. We should listen to the other side of the story…enough polite lies. No. We will not listen to father's side. This was Kyoko Mori’s way of resisting her father’s sh***y patriarchal rule. His absurd cruelty. Mori cannot be effective if she is not cruel. So, be a feminist Hemingway. Do to men what Hemingway did to women...and don't apologize.

For Kyoko, silence is the worst kind of lie because it gives the sense that things are alright when they could be all wrong. It gives a sense of legitimacy to things that are happening around us...those who are silent, tacitly consent.

The book ends on an interesting note...a romantic vision of the author dreaming about her hometown. For her, Kobe was a miserable place with miserable memories, and yet, she can't help but dream of it. That is a very honest notion of home...it's the place we can't help but love despite everything.

Kyoko says toward the end of the book, "We mean so many things by home." She's right. Whenever I read a good book I feel at home. Whenever I think of the coast of Nagasaki, I feel at home. Whenever I hear a child laugh, I think of my dad and how he could make me smile almost at whim...and I feel at home. I hope this book makes you think of home, reader. I hope you read this book and reflect on home deeply like I did.

So, I leave you with this line by Kyoko Mori, "I keep coming home to books just as my dreams bring me back to the expanse of blue water."

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book should have been called, 'I've Got an Ax to Grind with Japan'. 97% of the book was Kyoko Mori giving her very negative opinion of her home county, its people, its language, and its culture. It was interesting, however, because she was so candid and it was a unique perspective. Mori spent the first 20 years of her life in Japan and the last 20 in the midwestern US where she lives currently, and has only made a few short visits back to Japan. It's not like she has loads of great things to say about the US, but we do fare quite a bit better under Mori's very unforgiving opinions and views than our Japanese counterparts. After a while the book gets kind of silly, all this Japan-bashing and picking apart of the mundane. She really loses me when she starts airing out the 25 year-old dirty laundry between her step-mother and herself. Who cares if your step-mother lied to the next-door neighbor about some love letter you wrote or didn't write when you were a teenager? (Answer: only Kyoko Mori). Do we really need page after page about these scuffles with your mother? (Answer: no, we don't). But here's the thing: this was an insider's look at modern Japan, and even though it was really negative, I'm fascinated by the subject .

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Born and raised in Japan, the Americanized Mori expounds on the restrictive, complicated and traditional Japanese society she seems to despise. As a half-Japanese, very American Midwesterner, I did not buy into her comparisons of Japan with the conservative U.S. heartland. While the book does more than a good job of exposing the fascinating (and often negative) undercurrents of Japanese society, I get the feeling Mori was so choked by her upbringing she has gone to the opposite extreme.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, well-written, and insightful, but occasionally more negative toward Japanese culture than I really felt comfortable with. I can't disagree with her, as obviously she knows more about the culture than I do, but I couldn't help feeling a little nervous about her negativity at times.

[Jacqueline Knirnschild · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of thought-provoking, anthropological-like observations on Japanese & American culture. I found the middle chapters, especially “Symbols” & “School,” to be the most insightful. The last few chapters meandered into a dull, trite place full of generalizations, and the ending was cliche. Also, Mori seemed a bit negative in her opinions of Japan. Overall, though, it was still a great read—learned a lot about Japanese culture and reflected upon my own Midwestern culture & upbringing. The prose are also beautiful and accessible—this book had a calming effect on me (even when discussing some ugly stuff, like suicide, infidelity & sexual harassment).

[Raquel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is getting three stars because I have mixed feelings about it. On one side, it was really interesting. The essays are (or at least come off as) very personal and that gives you a perspective that you could not get any other way. They make you think, or at least they made me think. Both when we agreed and when we did not, her words have on various occasions made me reflect and ponder. And I will always love that a book makes me think. This book is a lot about home and origins, or at least it was to me.

I have seen mentioned in some reviews that she seems quite negative about her own country, but to be completely honest: she would know better. More than that: we all tend to be particularly harsh about our own, in every sense, so I get it. I, too, am a person that left her country and does not feel the wish to come back, and that I understand.

I did get an underlying feeling that bothered me: I often felt that she judged others and their choices as poorer than her own, that she is on the right and she is enlightened (often, I could add here "by the West"). I know plenty of people are guilty of thinking they are always in the right, and it will make me just as uncomfortable coming from my neighbour´s mouth at one of our lounge parties as it did in this book.

Another thing that bothered me Terribly is her definition of manga, that I shall not repeat here. There is an incredible amount of questionable and really problematic content in manga, but the reductionist definition she chose to enlighten her readers with was just terrible and prejudiced.

Aside from those little details, I would recommend this book. It is a good read.

[Gail Jeidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully crafted series of essays, linked in a lovely way. 'Polite Lies' is Kyoko Mori's story. Kyoko left Japan (and a tragic childhood)at age 20 to come to America for school and settle in the midwest. 'Polite Lies' embodies her cross-cultural experience. I learned so much that was surprising, 'shocking' is not an overstatement, about the restraint of the Japanese culture and particularly its burden on women. Kyoko's take on life in the midwest brought me home to my origins in Wisconsin. Her writing is clear and honest.

[Walter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Books by and/or about "border crossers" usually examine both positive and negative aspects of a liminal existence...well, at least the ones that I have enjoyed have done this. This book, on the other hand, is an extended rant about the author's take on what's wrong with Japan and Japanese culture. It's a beautifully written rant, but still a rant.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I stumbled upon Kyoko Mori’s memoir/essay collection Polite Lies. I was curious about what observations she had to make about being a woman who was raised in Japan and grew into adulthood in the American Midwest. She discusses different aspects of the two cultures and her experiences in different chapters under headings like: Language, Family, Secrets, Rituals, a Woman’s Place, Bodies, Symbols, School, Tears, Lies, Safety, and Home. Some of the observations seem like broad generalizations and others seem to be heavily influenced by a very unhappy childhood where her mother committed suicide when she was just a girl and she had to endure an abusive and unloving father who may have been a sociopath. It is a very sad story and a very personal story, but it colors her perceptions very much. However, her criticism has some common critiques of the two cultures. She finds the Japanese language vague and constrictive-a common complaint of the rigid social structure of the society where everybody belongs, but no one is allowed to be himself or herself. She finds well-meaning Americans intrusive. An interesting personal look at the two cultures, but not a great overview.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

(If we had half-stars, I'd probably call this one a 3.5)

Some reviewers found these essays overly negative, but I came away feeling that Mori was honest about her experiences growing up in Japan; her mother committed suicide when Mori was 12, and almost immediately thereafter the household was run by a step-mother, who seems to have highly resented her, and a distant, uncaring father. What might be seen as bitterness on her part, or at least self-pity, I saw as related to the points she was making in the essay when she brings up past events; at worst, she may have been a bit "selective" in her perception of current (a decade ago) Japanese culture. Even if the reader doesn't necessarily agree with each point, Mori expresses herself well enough to make the collection well worth the read.

[Sgilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never read anything like this before. This is an insightful and very personal account of a Japanese woman's feelings about Japanese culture vs American culture. No holds bar approach.She was forthcoming and not very kind about rules, expectations and impossible standards women are expected to follow. A must read!! You will examine yourself, your culture, your beliefs, etc in a new light and will gain a new perspective about the Japanese.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that made me decide to go get my Master's studying Japan. Mori, Japanese-born but now an American citizen, compares various aspects of femininity and social expectations in both countries. Not only was I sucked in immediately, but I had to know how much is still true. That answer is still in progress.

[wynny · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all I want to excuse the very short review I am about to write as it's been two weeks since I read it and I might have to reread some chapters that especially stood out to me (and why I gave this book four stars)

Also I wouldn't call myself an avid reader. Polite Lies, including He's Scared She's Scared a psychological non fiction on relationship issues and A Wizard of Earthsea an old fiction of wizardry is one of the only few books I've read in the past... 5 years...

This is also my first review ever to write!

When I bought the book from Book Off in Takadanobaba, a city just 5 stations away from my house that's usually crowded with drunk college students and office workers on Nomikai (a cultural drinking out among colleague in Japan and I guess Korea etc, also?) I was expecting it to be a linguistic book. One that foreigners like me would find helpful for navigating life in Japan.

And I guess I did take a handful of new perspectives from the book that will help me survive the cultural differences. (We'll have to see once my japanese college resumes after this summer break and whether or not I am helped by this book and of course Kyoko's intention was not to write a selfhelp book)

But in the end, or in the middle of it. I realized she was talking about something else much deeper. Besides the tragedies that happened in her life I find myself relating so often to the sentences she wrote.

Although there are some aspects of her thinking that I would question now and again but dismiss because we can't all be rational and just in making decisions. A few chapters in and you would understand Kyoko's conflict with the Japanese language, society, its people, expressions and behaviors but at times I felt frustrated when it seemed that she put more weight on those barriers that there was none on her to speak the words she wanted to speak, the gestures she wanted to show to the people she cared about.

But of course it's easy for me to judge paragraphs and things would probably be different if Kyoko personally shared her story to me--maybe we were having a night out as two friends drinking alcohol from the convenient store.

As a whole I am so thankful to have a book in my hands that put to words everything I have been asking but no one seemed to understand. Most certainly not my japanese classmates. The issue of fitting in will always come up in conversations between me and my fellow foreign friends. To truly fit in as yourself and not have to change any important aspect that is, you.

This is getting personal but thanks to this book I thought to myself, after crying every day before class due to feeling like an alien. That at the end of the day no one had ill intention. And I could not possibly have done anything to change years of carefully constructed social cultures.

"I also missed my living room with its mismatched furniture. No matter how bad our furniture was, our house was still a home. In all the rooms, there were places to sit and relax: watch television, listen to music, talk, read. Chuck and I had put up our friends' artwork and posters of our favorite museum exhibits. The shelves were full of our books and music cassettes and CDs. Anyone who visited us would learn something about our tastes, interests, hobbies."

[Ridho AS · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adore her bravery in embracing her feeling, and it does not matter right or wrong, ethic or not. But how she showed the emotion and explained it in straightforward words made me appreciate more about her works.

Thank you for giving me another color of Japan.

[Edith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Kyoko Mori’s memoir “Yarn: Remembering the Way Home” inspired me to pick up this earlier memoir of hers. I REALLY enjoyed this book. Kyoko’s honesty and willingness to examine the “polite lies” we all engage in is a breath of fresh air. Having grown up in Kobe, Japan and spending the first half of her life there, she compares Japan to the U.S. and details the immense differences for us. SO interesting!

Her mother, immensely unhappy in her marriage, killed herself when Kyoko was 12. Suffering from a cruel, cold father and a “wicked” stepmother, she left Japan to finish college in the U.S. She got married and continued to make her home here. She describes her childhood home as “a place of sadness, secrets, and lies” and shares very personal experiences and feelings. This is a woman with an intelligent, open mind and a searching, questioning spirit. She is not afraid of truth-telling, even hard truth, and to her credit, she doesn’t seem to be hardened by bitterness. She just really wants to understand as much as she possibly can. There are chapters on “Language, Family, Secrets, Rituals, A Woman’s Place, Bodies, Symbols, School, Tears, Lies, Safety, and Home”.

Anyone the least bit interested in Japan will find this fascinating.

At the writing of this book, she was living in Green Bay, WI and teaching writing at a local Catholic college.

[Lorna Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book after living in Japan for a couple of years. It explained quite a bit about the differences in the Japanese and American approaches to conveying information, politeness, and honesty.

When I read about how doctors avoided telling patients and their families the truth about terminal illnesses, I cried. We had gone through a similar experience with a dear friend and colleague. He had been treated by a doctor in Japan for several months without being told exactly what the diagnosis was. Since he was still feeling ill, he finally returned to the U.S. where he saw his own doctor. He was finally diagnosed with stomach cancer. Whether or not he would have been able to treat the cancer effectively had it been discovered earlier, we'll never know. But even if it had been beyond treatment, he'd at least have been able to make decisions sooner and spend more time with his family. As it was, he passed away two months after leaving Japan.

Having lived half her life in Japan and half in the US, Mori has the perfect perspective to understand and describe the cultural communication differences.

A valuable read for anyone living in Japan.

[PlushyPirate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Kyoko Mori's A Dream of Water my freshman year of college (four years ago) and was struck by how beautifully she writes. Certain phrases stick with me even now. I got the chance to meet her this year and rediscovered my love of her prose.

I read Polite Lies today, in two sittings. I subjected my mom, my friends, and my entire facebook circle to multiple quotes and almost cried a couple of times.

I'm familiar with the Midwest, especially Green Bay, so I really enjoy seeing her perspective (both foreign and familiar)on a culture I know so well, as well as her comparisons to Japan. Her commentary on writers also rings wonderfully true, especially her observation that she views a well-written book with the same admiration as she views an Olympic athlete's performance, because they are both perfect examples of their craft.

Definitely going to read this one again -- this time with a highlighter and pencil in hand. I was lazy today and read fast, but next time, I'll be poring over it slowly as it should be read.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really disliked this book. Even accounting for the fact that it's a bit dated (estimating the author was in Japan in the 60s/70s), it's mainly the author talking about everything she hates about Japan, which is colored through the lens of her fairly miserable childhood, and making very broad generalizations about Japanese culture/language and Midwestern culture/language that often seemed inaccurate to me.

[Laura Patak · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the honest and eye opening comparisons of Japanese and American cultures. I did not enjoy all the whining and blaming that the author does about her life.

[Eleonora Pogorelova · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across Kyoko’s book when thrifting in Tempe and the cover resonated with me. As someone who visited Japan this year for the fist time and who has been stuck between cultures for a long period of time, I decided to give it a try.

It’s a great book about a Japanese woman from Kobe whose mother kills herself when she (the author of the book) is just 12. The author starts to live with her father and stepmother, whom her father has been seeing while still being married to his now dead wife and this chapter of her life is rough. The author moves to the States and settles in Midwest where she studies and later teaches Creative Writing. The book compares Midwest and Japan, talks about health and medicine, the role of the woman in the society and how people lie.

I was 12 when I experienced cultural differences between the Ukrainians and the British. I spent close to 2 weeks in the UK staying with a local family whose only interest was to learn how far away from Chernobyl my family lived. Most of the evenings, my classmate and I stayed in our room and did not communicate with that family.

When I was 15, I moved to Midwest for one year and that was the time when my character was forged.

While working for Ukrainian businesses, I only worked exclusively with Ukrainian customers for about 9 months in total and I was always stuck between multiple cultures. At my last place of work in Ukraine, my approach towards business was “very American” (tbh, I still don’t know what this means).

Having lived in the US for over 2 consecutive years now without leaving the country for too long, I have to agree with a person who advised on Facebook on how to adapt to living in the States as a Ukrainian. They recommend to let Americans be a part of your life. The biggest mistake people make when moving abroad, is trying to live the same way as they used to back home. Hence, people become depressed, unhappy and can’t find the reason to be where they are. Not adapting to the new environment is not good for anyone.

I loved reading Kyoko’s book. Some quotes from it:

- In any language, it is hard to talk about feelings, and there are things that are almost unsayable because they sound too harsh, painful, or intimate. When we are fluent, though, we can weave and dodge our way through the obstacles and get to the difficult thing we want to say; each of us weaves and dodges in slightly different ways, using our individual style or voice. In the way we say the almost unsayable, we can hear the subtle modulations and shifts that make each of our voices unique.
- We gravitate toward the settings we associate with home. I feel safe in big cities, not because I underestimate the crime rate, but because I know how to interpret what I see. A bad neighborhood looks like a bad neighborhood, in ways that I cannot explain to someone who doesn't know. When I stop at a gas station because I am lost, I can tell whether this is the kind of place where I should park my car two feet from the door, run into the store, and ask the attendant for directions or where I should get some gas, saunter into the store to buy a soda, and ask to use the bathroom. For someone who is afraid of big cities, all busy streets look equally threatening - just as all farmhouses look, to me, like places where a person would be bitten by big dogs.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kyoko Mori grew up in Japan and moved to the U.S. for college, making her home in Green Bay, Wisconsin. This collection "Polite Lies," explores components of both cultures--language, roles in family and community, career expectations, marriage--with a lens toward expectations placed on women.

My favorite parts of the book were Mori's examination of language, and how people in both the U.S. and Japan use apologies to establish who has power in a verbal exchange, and to maintain polite relationships. People in both cultures use polite lies like "We should hang out some time," or "Tell me how you're doing" that the listener must be culturally fluent and self-aware enough to interpret the authenticity of the speaker. Her anecdotes about the variety of apologies and the complexity of the different ways to address someone in Japanese were fascinating.

In any book like this, a writer is going to have to paint with broad strokes to compare and contrast lives in two countries. Even with that caveat, though, I feel like Mori went a bit far. As someone who lives in the U.S., I could quickly recognize that most of U.S. culture isn't really like that of a small midwestern college town. I am obviously less familiar with Japanese culture, but there were several instances of Mori universalizing dynamics that may be unique to her family; many of the Japanese reviewers I've read tend to share this critique. In particular, Mori has a fraught relationship with her stepmother; the chapters where she explored this relationship felt a little incongruous with the goals of the rest of the book and could have been better explored in a different context.

I appreciate Mori's insights, I just wish she had been more straightforward about the limitations of her perspective here.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love memoirs and this is a great one. Mori has a simple, straight forward, yet engaging way of transporting you in her world(s).
From language, to symbols, to lies, she analyses parts of her worlds and opens her heart and wounds to the reader. Many reviews say that she was too negative about Japan, but I don’t think we have any right to blame her for that. Her experience was authentically negative, no one in her place would have had many positive things to say. She doesn’t hate Japan, she just recognises that, although that’s where she is originally from and where her roots are, it’s not where she wants to be; it’s as simple as that, she made a choice and these are her reasons for it. Like every memoir, it’s not for the reader to judge or agree, we are just listening to her side of the story.

If I had to sum up this book in a sentence I’d say this: it’s a story about a woman who had no voice and finally found it in another country.
This is for me the essence of her experience: Japanese culture gave her ready-to-use sentences and fit-in-a-box roles. In the States she found she could speak her mind, write in her personal style, live a life only she had chosen: freedom.

I strongly recommend this book and look forward to reading more from this author.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a lot of books about Japan.

Most of them fall into one of two categories: an academic distilling their scholarly work into a more popular format, or a travelogue from a sparkle-eyed foreigner who is enamored and befuddled by Japan in entirely predictable ways.

Mori's book is neither. It is an intensely personal memoir with piercing observations as an outsider to both cultures. Mori's Japan is oppressive, smothering, difficult; full of pain, grief, awkwardness, hassle, and isolation because she refuses to be anything but herself -- and it's a side of Japan foreigners obsessed with anime and video games rarely if ever see.

Her harsh, unflinching critiques are as bracing as a winter wind; yet she conveys her thoughts and emotions with incredible deftness, clarity, and skill. The last chapter in particular, "Home", is the perfect capstone that brings the whole collection together beautifully.

[Vickie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by a friend from a writing workshop. As someone who's bilingual and managed Taiwanese, American, Scandinavian, and Chinese cultural expectations over the years, this book resonated with me a ton. Many reviewers on Goodreads seem to take offense with the fact that the author "dislikes" aspects of Japanese culture, but I think it's... Frankly hilarious. Americans will endlessly complain about America without thinking twice about it, but somehow, as a token/representative of a non-dominant culture, we're supposed to love everything about our hometown? If anything, I greatly appreciate Kyoko Mori's honesty and clarity in confronting the cultural differences she's observed in her home country. Her words on the identity shift that happens when you travel halfway across the world "home" especially ring true to me. I borrowed it from the library and plan on buying a copy so I can own it and revisit chapters in the future.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very surprised by this book, although I guess I didn't have any context or specific expectations going into it. I thought it was a super interesting and insightful look at two cultures (America and Japan). This book achieved something that a lot of books fail to do, the cultural discussions in the book were engaging to read about while also being intellectual. I would imagine some people might be turned off by the author's candor about her divorce or some of the other things she talks about, but I really appreciated the straightforward honesty.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a window into a culture that has been totally unknown to me. Having had the opportunity to visit Japan and mingle with Japanese people did not give me the experience to learn much about them. One thing that impressed me was their honest behavior when the owner of one of the stores where I bought a couple of. Items, followed me to another store to give me back the extra pay he had inadvertently charged me for his merchandise. Honesty is a quality that I highly admire, and I was very impressed by this seller.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I thought this book dragged at times, she is an expert reader of people - I was fascinated by the the spot-on observations she makes of people, cultures, and locals such as what’s polite/not polite, what people really mean, what people might mean, etc. very interesting critique of Japan’s hyper-patriarchal culture. It’s like listening to a friend share about her life - your smartest friend who makes the most astute observations and you who you wish you were as smart as.

[Ren · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's always interesting reading about the differences in cultures. I enjoyed this book because of the focus on the differences in how women are treated and what is expected of them in the Japanese culture as opposed to the American culture. I can see where a lot of her behaviors come from but I do think Kyoko needs to lighten up about the laundry!

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays includes a lot of somber reflection not just about living between two cultures but also about processing family pain and grief. The opening essay on language would be fantastic to use in a class someday.

[Powersamurai · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 2020s, this book has to be viewed as a snapshot of 1970s–1980s, and 1990s Japan. Much has changed in Japan since. Much has not changed, but is still noticeable in different ways. As one of those who have lived in Japan those eras, you nod your head and reminisce about a bygone era.