Japan's habit of technological innovation alongside tradition has surfaced in recent literary fads such as the "Densha no Otoko" (Train Man) phenomenon. What started as an urgent plea for dating advice posted to an online forum morphed into a modern tale of boy meets girl with Horatio Alger-style success for the author, with film, TV and manga adaptations. Cellphone novels, e-books, Twitter haiku; it was inevitable that a book collecting emails would surface in this techno-creative stew of new lit.
Alex Kahney's "Life and Nihonjin: Dispatches From Japan" is one such novel. "Dispatches" starts with an honest explanation: "What I'm doing is putting the emails together as a memoir of my life in Japan." What follows, unfortunately for true literature, is an unflinchingly honest hodgepodge of emails lacking any of the covert workings of an author to pull the story into cohesion. The result: soaring philosophical passages and painful pithy observations of Japan on one side, with confusion, poor characterization and chaos on the other, for a final mishmash that reeks rancor as much as it rewards with ingenuous purity.
For Kahney's pain is purely autobiographical as a betrayed international spouse who is denied access to his children. Yet the early pages of the book lull the reader with languid, serpentine quirkiness as Kahney, a musician, poet, dream-interpreter, looks for connections in life and dreams, retelling them through emails back home to England. Be warned: If you appreciate a cohesive plot, this book is not for you. It meanders, sidetracks, ambles, yet admirably captures the essence of one sensitive human.