Lost Girls and Love Hotels: A Novel, by Catherine Hanrahan, is a rather standard expat novel, both in form and tone. The main character is lost, drifting, and buries her pain in booze, drugs, and transgressive sex in Tokyo – which obliges her needs.
We have seen and read this before. But Hanrahan has a snappy prose style, and wit, so this novel, while sticking to the “script” is never uninteresting or even fully predictable.
As an expat novel, some people will wonder if the Japanese are treated like the Other, just players in the background of a westerner’s narcissism romp. Maybe. If I was Japanese or Asian I would probably think as much. Which opens up a wide field of questions about how we treat characters and cultures in our art. I have no ready answers to this kind of complexity. This is the beginning of a long discussion.
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