Description
Rhiannon Paine was working as a technical writer for Hewlett-Packard in Silicon Valley; she agreed reluctantly to transfer to their Tokyo branch. She had no idea what she was in for, and neither did her Japanese colleagues. While they coped with her social gaffes, like arriving late to work and blowing her nose in public, Paine struggles with Japanese food — deviant sea-creatures on rice — and with the Japanese language, which kept tripping her up with new verb tenses (the conditional, the colition, the passive, the causative, the potential). This insightful and entertaining memoir tells what happens when a quirky, free-spirited writer from California comes into unexpected collision with the habits of an ancient and highly conventional culture. Paine’s book is a tender, lyrical and very funny tribute to a country and a people that won the heart of a reluctant foreigner.
