Like a Yemenese bride-to-be who first sees the countenance of her fiance in a photo presented by relatives, Rebecca Otowa experienced a presentiment of her future in a black-and-white image of a building, a 350-year-old farmhouse in rural Japan.
Otowa's book takes its place on the shelf alongside a long and well-regarded line of female authors who have written "lifestyle abroad" works. Many of these accounts, like Lady Fortescue's "Perfume from Provence" and Mary Taylor Simeti's "On Persephone's Island," come from the fertile, sun-blessed regions of southern Europe, where lassitude is cherished as much as hard work.
"We walked in the fields," the author writes of her first visit to meet her future parents-in-law, "and his father picked a watermelon. We swam in the pond and wrote wishes on stones, tossing them into the water." This evokes a pastoral idyll closer, perhaps, to the Midi than rural Kyoto, but we soon read that adjusting to life in the Japanese countryside is not all plain sailing.
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