Potato in a Rice Bowl

by Keener Peggy Keener

Overview

In the memoir Potato in a Rice Bowl, Peggy Keener shares her wacky misadventures as a sincere-though misguided-Minnesota housewife struggling to create normalcy for her family while living in Japan during the 1960s. Through charming vignettes, Peggy takes a look back at her bewildering foray into the Japanese culture after her husband accepts a military assignment in a country thousands of miles away from the small prairie town of Austin, Minnesota, where she was born and raised. The mother of three boys, Peggy chronicles how she managed to settle her disoriented family and flounce headfirst into the thorny, baffling culture while her husband was miles away on military missions. As she bungles through her boys' Japanese school, grapples with the eccentricities of her home and neighbors, and reconstructs the language to her liking, she somehow ends up as a personality on Japanese national television-all with the earnest hope of melding with her new country. In this humorous, irreverent, and even soul-searching collection of anecdotes, Peggy provides an entertaining glimpse into the enigmatic Land of the Rising Sun.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781450220439
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/05/2010
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.93(d)

About the Author

For eighteen years, Peggy Keener,
with her three children in tow, lived the wacky eccentricities of the Japanese culture. She now lives in
Minneapolis with her husband, dogs, and nearby grandchildren. When she isn't writing, gardening or decorating, she works as a professional food taster.

Editorial Reviews

2015-06-09
A lighthearted debut memoir about a young Colorado mother's full-on collision with Japanese culture.In 1962, at the tender age of 24, Keener jumped at the chance to relocate to Tokyo, where her civilian husband, Glen, had been hired to do intelligence work with the U.S. Army. Not one to shy away from adventure, she hit the ground running with two baby boys in her arms and a well-developed sense of fun. It hardly even took the wind out of her sails when, on her first day, she was firmly counseled by Glen's commanding officer never to ask what her husband was doing: "For sure I would have blabbed stuff I shouldn't have," she writes. What follows are her triumphs, mishaps, and gaffes as she spent long periods of time with her boys and acclimated herself to her new country—without so much as a telephone to help with such gargantuan tasks as house-hunting. At one point, she nearly drowned in Tokyo Bay, but she went on to learn to love the Japanese language, sumo wrestling, and local cuisine while also absorbing the niceties of Japanese-style etiquette. Improbably, she eventually became an media star for teaching English on Japanese television: "For criminy sakes, I was as qualified for that position as a ham sandwich," she cracks. Her career quickly ended, though, when she became pregnant and no longer fit her billing as "a single maiden": "much to everyone's relief, I took a leave of absence, bowing out of the job about the time I could no longer bow." Although Keener devotes more than 400 pages to this frolic down Memory Lane, she displays a jaw-dropping ability to keep readers turning pages. She's a master of the one-liner, but some of the book's corny, even archaic-sounding words and phrases ("Phooey!"; "Nanny-nanny-boo-boo!") may not appeal to everyone. Still, her work here could almost catapult her into the rarefied ranks of such wildly successful writers as Peg Bracken, Majorie Holmes, and Erma Bombeck—even if she has come late to the show.Endearing, affectionate, and often funny reminiscences.

Kirkus Reviews