Review of Turning Japanese by Cathy Yardley
4.75 Star

At its core, Chick Lit is a genre of stories about young women and their ups and downs, told in a witty and brilliant first person voice.  They are both fun and thought provoking in equal parts.  The same goes for the best of shoujo manga.  They can be romantic stories, but they’re stories of dreamers and fighters, who happen to be young women.   So when I got the chance to review a book that promised to mix the two of them, I jumped at the chance.

Cathy Yardley’s ‘Turning Japanese’ is the story of a young woman who gets the chance of a lifetime.  Her manga is chosen as the winner of a contest where the prize is an internship at a Japanese manga publisher in Tokyo.    Unfortunately, she’s never really lived very far away from home before, and believes she is about to become engaged to her long term boyfriend.

But this is a chance of a lifetime, and so she makes the move. And this is where the real story begins.  Lisa Falloya’s Japanese journey isn’t just about manga and the industry that makes it possible.  It’s about fitting into her own skin, and finding what makes her happy, as opposed to simply filling the needs of those around her, including her friends and her fiancé.  It’s about her ability to bridge the cultural gaps between the United States and Japan, and how she learns to use her own Japanese and American heritage as an advantage.

Yardley also depicts some of the particular Japanese social issues that have been reported about in recent years; the increased freedom of young women, the strict Japanese corporate social structure and the so called ‘lost generation’ of hikkomori, those young people who after difficult social experiences, shut themselves inside their homes.  This is, for me, the most amazing part of what Chick Lit as a genre does; the idea that at the heart of certain books are much larger issues, just waiting to be explored by those who wish to.  For this, and the rest of the story, I raise a cup of sake to Cathy Yardley.  Brava.