White Girl In Tokyo Does Drink, Drugs And Has Wild Sex To Forget Canada

[Mulboyne]

[Socratesabroad]

Is this like a Harlequin Romance novel or something?

[dimwit]

And when she meets Kazu, a mysterious gangster...

I'm assuming that she is suffering from a bit of adjective confusion. Mysterious isn't a word I tend to associate with Japanese Gangsterism.

[72hw]

This book sounds similar to the 2003 film titled "Stratosphere Girl" which, if you have not yet seen it, I highly recommend.

[Greji]

I'm assuming that she is suffering from a bit of adjective confusion. Mysterious isn't a word I tend to associate with Japanese Gangsterism.

Ahh, come on Dimmer! Romance and mystery! You know you Canadians are suckers for tender love stories with such an original plot!

[Mulboyne]

Kirkus Best of Dec '05 (PDF)

In Lost Girls and Love Hotels, young Canadian expat Margaret has taken refuge from her brother’s insanity, and the dissolution of her family, in Tokyo, portrayed in the novel as a restless, dynamic city of light and lunacy. Catherine Hanrahan, 36, like her protagonist a Canadian who lived in Japan (she worked for five years as an English teacher and bar hostess), says that, though the idea for Margaret’s story came to her in Kyoto, she had to depart the country to finish the novel. “After being in Japan for a few years I started to get used to all the weirdness ― it seemed perfectly normal after a time that a student’s hobby was sleeping or that all the women at my gym wore pantyhose under their workout shorts,” she says. “It was only after I returned to Canada that I could really appreciate and write about the strangeness of Japan.” In the book, Margaret, who teaches English at the Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute, attempts to forget her old life through drugs and feverish, anonymous sex in Tokyo’s famous Love Hotels, fantasy-themed playgrounds where couples can rent rooms for a “rest” (1-3 hours) or a “stay” (10-12 hours). But Margaret’s flight from herself is impeded when she meets and falls for an enigmatic gangster named Kazu, and begins to be haunted by visions of a missing blonde Westerner who also came to Japan to let her troubled past drift away. “[The characters in the book] are reminiscent of the kind of young travelers working under the table in Tokyo. There’s a kind of reckless energy to them that I tried to capture,” says the author. “I think everyone that spends an appreciable length of time in a country as different as Japan is looking for some kind of escape.”

[Greji]

I'm assuming that she is suffering from a bit of adjective confusion. Mysterious isn't a word I tend to associate with Japanese Gangsterism.

Maybe he was a Japanese gangster from Canada. Wouldn't that fit the mysterious?

[GomiGirl]

I still think that Ultra should collect up the best of FG and make a book!! Truth is stranger than fiction.. and what a strange bunch of characters we are...

[otakuden]

I still think that Ultra should collect up the best of FG and make a book!! Truth is stranger than fiction.. and what a strange bunch of characters we are...

now that is a fabulous idea