Almost Japanese

By Sarah Sheard

Book Overview

In Sarah Sheard's celebrated novel Almost Japanese, a young girl's obsession with a famous Japanese musician blossoms into personal transformation. In spare, lyrical prose, Sheard documents Emma's discovery of her new next door neighbour, a dazzling Japanese symphony conductor. Things Japanese soon begin to transform Emma's world. Several years later, she must journey to Japan on a private pilgrimage to connect to the source of her obsession.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1552450848
• ISBN13: 9781552450840
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 10.9" x 2.0"

Customer Reviews

JUST GOOD. JUST NOW. FRECKLE.

Sheard has always been able to create captivating images. This is particularly true of her very appealing first novel, ALMOST JAPANESE, an exhilarating account of a young girl's infatuation with a Japanese symphony conductor, a man widely believed to have been inspired by Ozawa. In that novel there are exquisite evocations of Canada (Emma's parents give her "a red canvas canoe with honey-coloured ribs") and Japan (where Emma looks down on a "raft of petals, caught under a bridge, quaking below her...") ALMOST JAPANESE also marvellously succeeds because it so cleverly polarizes two very different portraits: the first of Emma, a big, good-hearted, and buoyant girl, the second of the gracious and diminutive Akira in his "indigo kimono, camellia-patterned, white petals across his shoulders." And in Japan, when she gets there, Emma keeps a record of the hilariously illogical English slogans she sees on t-shirts in Tokyo: JUST GOOD. JUST NOW. FRECKLE. on one. And, on another, ASSORT. PERSIST. CONTACT.