Fear and Trembling - Humiliation at a Tokyo Firm

[amdg]

"At six o'clock, having washed my hands, I went around the offices and shook the hands of those who had, in their various ways, let me know they thought of me as a human being. Fubuki's hand was not among them."

Welcome to the closed world of Japanese-style company politics in the early 1990s as Amelie-san ends her tragi-comic year as a foreign employee with a mega-trading house in Tokyo.

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=book&id=176

Fear and Trembling

[Mulboyne]

The good news about this book is that it is thin and you can probably finish it without leaving the bookstore. The bad news is that it isn't very good. A very overwrought and over dramatic treatment for mundane material. But I did read to the end and I still remember it so maybe it had something. I'm sure this has been out for a while, though.

[samuraiwig]

Someone else got there first with this idea...although Laura Kriska was clearly not the female Donald Richie and she had a predilection for including too much dull detail of the "I got up and walked to the sink. I brushed my teeth, made coffee, ate breakfast and then brushed my teeth again" variety.

The Accidental Office Lady

[Taro Toporific]

... I'm sure this has been out for a while, though.

Hey wait a minute]http://img67.exs.cx/img67/9240/Amelie_Nothomb_book9D.jpg[/img]

[Taro Toporific]

MORE FUN THAN A BELGIAN WAFFLE
New York Post, November 19, 2004
FEAR AND TREMBLING
Tokyo story. (Stupeur et tremblements)
In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 102 minutes.

'FEAR and Trembling," a biting comedy set in Tokyo by French writer-director Alain Corneau, is the perfect companion piece to Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation."
Credit Sylvie Testud, who is delectable as Amelie, a Belgian who spent her first five years in Japan and speaks the language flawlessly.
Now in her 20s, she lands a coveted job as a translator at a giant Tokyo corporation. But she's unable to navigate the country's complex social mores and corporate etiquette.
You'd think Amelie's knowledge of Japanese would be a plus; instead, she frightens clients who are afraid of Western spies, and is ordered to "forget" she can speak the language....more...

[AssKissinger]

I just watched the movie last night and thought it was good. It portrays Japan very negatively though. I'm not really sure if she has a grudge against Japan, it's just truth, she's being funny, just telling a story or a mixture of these things but whatever the case I enjoyed the movie. Some of the dialog was really on fire!

[Mulboyne]

The author is a star in France and has just written again about her time in Japan:

Guardian: The outsider

It takes me a while to recognise the short, dark-haired woman who comes to fetch me from the lobby at the publisher Albin Michel...Amélie Nothomb may be a massive star in the French literary firmament, but I never imagined she was the kind of star who would insist a PR should stay in the room during the interview...In the flesh, the prize-winning Belgian novelist looks nothing like the striking portrait on the front of her latest bestseller, Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam - bright white cheeks and scarlet lips peering from behind the blade of a Japanese sword - nor the wide-eyed younger self on the front of the latest French edition of Fear and Loathing. Neither is there much of a resemblance to the face of the surprised toddler which stares from the front cover of The Character of Rain, nor the high-contrast author photograph which adorns the back. None of which would be of any importance were it not for the fact that for nearly a decade, Nothomb has found her greatest success by putting her own life under the lens, fashioning episodes from her early years into short, pungent, autobiographical fiction.

Fear and Loathing, awarded the Académie Française prize in 1999 and skilfully filmed by Alain Corneau in 2003, tells the story of the year she spent working for a big Japanese corporation, following Amelie-san's catastrophic encounters with the company's hierarchy. The Character of Rain, first published in 2000, reimagines the author's early years in Japan, charting her transformation from an unresponsive piece of living matter to the beloved focus of the household. Ni d'Eve ni d'Adam, which won the Prix de Flore at the end of last year, returns to the same period of her life as Fear and Loathing, but this time tells the story of her love affair with a young Japanese man. Writing about an episode of her own life allows her to "conquer herself", she says..."Of course you have memories," she continues, "and these memories are convincing. But it's really at the moment when I write them down - when I write about my relationship with that Japanese boy in Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam - that they reach a degree of reality which is incandescent, that I've really conquered a story, understood it and feel that it is really part of me." Often she has no opinions about an experience until the process has begun, she explains. "It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me"...more...