Donald Richie : Finding the self and losing others

Review of Suzanne Kamata's Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2007), at The Japan Times (09.12.2007) :

Much as I would like to believe in the added levels that such a narrator would provide, I am not sure they are there because the author has kept the heroine very close to the genre pattern for victimized mothers. She hovers at the playground, she hangs outside the boy's window, staring in, like the stock figure in such hankie-friendly melodramas as "Stella Dallas." And very affecting she is.

On the other hand, the writer does not always agree with her character and gives us ways to slip past the persona: "After making miso soup for the first time I felt kind of tired"; in her maternal sorrow she muses about Mel Gibson "one eye patched, soaking with sweat" as he runs toward her; at someone else's wedding "Braham's [sic] wedding march fills our ears." What kind of a narrator is this? Would you trust her?

My advice is, don't. The novel is more interesting when you experience it as the story of an expatriate in the throes of self-creation, trying to decide who she is and making one instructive error after another.