Sujata Massey

Girl in a Box is the same collection of brand names and reflections on relationships that made "chick lit" out of The Typhoon Lover (released the previous year). I really don't care for the lead character—Rei Shimura, to whom all those material things constitutes life, but at least we see a fair amount of Japanese life. Rei is evidently half Japanese (much is made of her less than Asian eyes) but easily fits into Japanese society. She appears to speak the language such that native Japanese don't necessarily notice that she's not native, but is limited in her reading ability, as happens with many who grow up with the language but not within the culture. With Japanese, more than half the writing system is phonetic, so you've got a good chance to read enough to figure out what a sentence might mean, while with Chinese, fluency with the spoken language won't mean anything toward reading ability. And more than one of my classmates in graduate school neither could speak nor understand any spoken Chinese but could read with the wind.

 

Rei is again working with all the acronym agencies in the spy world of my current city of residence (Washington, DC), and in fact spends several early pages of the book living right here in my Pentagon City neighborhood. Odd, now that I think of it—Nordstrom's is probably the only clothing name that doesn't get mentioned in this book, and Rei lived practically next door. She spends most of the rest of the pages as a sales clerk in a Japanese department store, going deep undercover for her investigative work.

 

There's some good material on modern Japanese culture. Despite her clear love of Things Japanese, Rei doubts she could live there, after being the target of several sexual harassment incidents where male executives attempted to exercise their feudal rights. And the daily work activities of retail employees is often shown as the book progresses. In both subject matter areas, the cultural requirement for consensus (is how I think we'd characterize it), where the consensual result is dictated by upper management. suggests strongly that our Rei has always to be a visitor in Japan, or at least would have to be self-employed.

 

The plot is good, and we get into a goodly amount of trouble. Still, I'll leave the rest of this series to the ladies...

 

 --Michael Broschat, March 2009