Harriet Sergeant

The Old Sow in the Back Room by Harriet Sergeant. Published in 1994 and describing the author's time in the mid to late 80's when she and her family lived in Tokyo. They left London for Japan because of Sergeant's husband's work, but it's surprising how little this husband or their toddler figure into the story. The author interacts with her new neighbors, makes friends with other misfits, volunteers at a center for the underprivileged, goes to underground clubs, interviews to work as a hostess at a bar and ends up interviewing a mama-san, along with many other citizens. Which is strange, because throughout the book she is behaving as someone who is researching a book rather than just going about in a normal way, yet she doesn't state this as her purpose for interviewing people who are clearly uncomfortable with her prying and seem to not know she is a writer. There's also no explanation for why she goes on dates with a young gangster. It had been briefly discussed earlier that it wasn't unusual for Japanese wives to have boyfriends because their husbands were rarely home, but it seemed like she dove into dating five minutes after getting there and it wasn't clear if it was personal or professional.
These lapses in explanation don't keep it from being a really interesting "fish out of water" story. Her Western individualism is very funny when she goes to a public pool and refuses to follow the commands of the team of lifeguards.… (meer)