Almost Japanese

by Sarah Sheard

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552450840
Publisher:	Coach House Books
Publication date:	01/18/1994
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Sarah Sheard is the author of two other critically acclaimed novels, The Swing Era and the national bestseller The Hypnotist. Sarah won the 45 Below Award for her fiction, and a National Magazine Award for her essay on the Coach House Press. She lives in Toronto, where she mentors writers at Humber College and Ryerson Polytechnic University, and maintains a private practice as a psychotherapist and mediator.

Editorial Reviews

``Rationing the everyday things in life gave them magic, Japanese magic,'' muses Emma, the narrator of this precious tale about an awkward adolescent's ephemeral romance with a famous Japanese symphony conductor. Emma focuses with sensitive obsession on the delicate, resonant details of the maestro's existencehis slippers, his tea service, his chest hair peaking above his kimono. She longs for the uncluttered order of his life, the magic of his mind. By the end of the story, Emma has experienced other lovers and manages to mesh her sensual memories of the great conductor with her adult self. Sheard's evocative, sometimes humorous first novel is told with the crystal clarity of haiku. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Adolescent Emma uses physical detail to recall her childhood: feet leave ``two parallel tracks in the snow'' when she is dragged to nursery school; arms and legs make angels in flour on the kitchen floor; face is lost to the pin-holes of malicious classmates in a photograph. Emma is a gawky though imaginative outcast who, like the water in her father's flooded fountain, ``wanted out''out of the conventional world of the Canadian city where she lives. And Emma gets out by falling innocently in love with the prominent Japanese conductor who comes to direct the city's orchestra. Sheard gets just right all the details of Emma's obsessionan obsession that profoundly affects the course of her life. If we'd like the author to dig deeper into the nature of such longing, and if the ending drifts a bit, this intimate portrait of a young girl's maturing is still a fine addition to most collections. Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''

Library Journal