In general, I tend to enjoy graphic memoirs, so when I saw this on the New Books shelf at the library, I clearly had to check it out. Turning Japanese is about being young and adrift—between cities, between jobs, between cultures, and in various personal situations, family-wise and relationship-wise. It’s set in 1995, when MariNaomi was 22 and had recently broken up with her boyfriend of five years, quit her job, and moved from San Francisco to San Jose with her new boyfriend. He has a friend who works as a hostess in a bar for Japanese expats; she’s half-Japanese (her mom left Japan at 19 to be with her dad) and thinks maybe being a hostess will be a good way to learn the language and feel more connected to Japanese culture. This isn’t as easy or straightforward as she had thought it would be, and the experience of working as a hostess is not entirely positive, but she does save enough money and gain enough proficiency in the language to plan a 3-month trip to Japan with her boyfriend, the story of which makes up the second half of the book. In Japan, MariNaomi works as a hostess in Tokyo and she and her boyfriend, Giuseppe, do various touristy things, then head south to visit her grandparents in Fukuoka. We see the tensions in her relationship with Giuseppe, but also moments of sweetness, though ultimately a sense of separateness/aloneness prevails. Similar tensions/sweetness/separateness surface in regard to MariNaomi’s grandparents: this trip is the first time MariNaomi has been able to communicate with them without her mother between them to act as translator, and being able to communicate with them directly in some ways highlights the generation/culture/personality gaps between them.
Throughout the book there are various little vignettes—some about work, some about family, some about MariNaomi’s relationship with Giuseppe, some about travel. We get stories about co-workers and customers at the bars in San Jose and in Tokyo, stories about MariNaomi’s previous visits to Japan (and her relatives’ previous visits to the US to see her family), trips to the dog statue at Shibuya Station in Tokyo, and a trip to an ancient temple in the countryside, among other things. The black & white art is a pleasing mix of pages with 6 or 8 or 9 panels and pages with bigger segments, and I found the combination of the art and the story totally engrossing—I read a big chunk of this book on the subway between Queens and Brooklyn, and I was glad to have the big unmissable outdoor stretch over the Manhattan Bridge to remind me my stop was coming up soon—I was totally into the book/not particularly paying attention to where I was for most of the journey.
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