Gaijin bookcover

Gaijin

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Description

The Japanese word gaijin means "unwelcome foreigner." It's not profanity, but is sometimes a slur directed at non-Japanese people in Japan. My novel is called Gaijin... ======

Product Details

PublisherRunning Wild Press
Publish DateAugust 01, 2020
Pages244
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781947041677
Dimensions8.5 X 5.5 X 0.5 inches | 0.6 pounds

About the Author

Sarah Z. Sleeper is an ex-journalist with an MFA in creative writing. This is her first novel. Her short story, "A Few Innocuous Lines," won an award from Writer's Digest. Her non-fction essay, "On Getting Vivian," was published in The Shanghai Literary Review. Her poetry was published in A Year in Ink, San Diego Poetry Annual and Painters & Poets, and exhibited at the Bellarmine Museum. In the recent past she was an editor at New Rivers Press, and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Mason's Road. She completed her MFA at Fairfeld University in 2012. Prior to that she had a twenty-five-year career as a business writer and technology reporter and won three journalism awards and a fellowship at the National Press Foundation.

Reviews

Gajin is a captivating story about a young woman's journey to a foreign land to investigate the unsettling disappearance of her Japanese lover. Poetic and exquisite storytelling at its best. -- S. B. Bell, author of The Art of Redemption


In her new life in Japan, Sarah Z. Sleeper's protagonist Lucy is a fish out of water, and in over her head at the very same time. A candid, beautifully descriptive map of a young woman's changing emotional landscape. --Sally J. Pla, award-winning author of The Someday Birds


Sarah Sleeper's charming bildungsroman Gaijin-Japanese for "outsider"-tells the story of a naïve, young, Midwestern woman named Lucy. A bookish loner, inexperienced in the ways of the world or of the heart, she has a very short but intense "infatuation" with an exotic and worldly Japanese man named Owen Ota, whom she meets in her college English class. From Owen she develops an idealized picture of all things Japanese. The relationship, however, is complicated and, for Lucy, punctuated by emotionally odd behaviors on Owen's part; their courtship ends before it really begins when Owen returns suddenly and mysteriously to his home country. Obsessed with Owen, Lucy, the outsider, follows her heart and travels to Japan to find out his "secret." There she is confronted by ugly cultural realities, as well as unpleasant emotional ones, realities she wasn't prepared for. A nuanced, subtly written tale that reminds one of those Jamesian cultural clashes between ingenuous Americans and sophisticated foreigners, Sleeper's novel shows us how we are all, at heart, gaijin. A novel particularly relevant in today's highly charged xenophobic era. -- Michael C. White, author of Beautiful Assassin.

When Lucy, a young, American journalist seeking the truth about the sudden disappearance of her college boyfriend, moves to Okinawa, she gets more than she bargained for. Amidst large protests held over a lurid rape case involving an American military man and a young Japanese girl, everything Lucy thought she knew about herself, her past, and the world is upended. A veil is lifted and through the eyes of the Japanese, she sees her own foreignness. She becomes the gaijin, unwanted and alien, a stranger even to herself. Against a backdrop of tea ceremonies, lotus blossoms, haikus, and the gritty reality of the difficult history of American and Japanese relationships, Sarah Sleeper weaves her deftly told story of a young woman's memorable journey toward a greater understanding of the truths that inhabit our complex world. Written with a journalist's eye for detail and a commitment to the truth, Gaijin is an expansive, meaningful debut. -- Karen Osborn, author most recently of the novel The Music Book

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