Japan itself is the comic hero of this sweet and funny, sad and inspiring novel. Gaby Stanton, an American professor living in Japan, has lost her job teaching English at Shizuyama University. (No one will tell her exactly why.) Alex Thorn, an American psychologist, is mourning his son, a Shizuyama exchange student who was killed in an accident. (No one will tell him exactly how.) Alex has come to this utterly foreign place to find the truth, and now Gaby is serving as his translator and guide. The key to mastering Japanese, she keeps telling him, is understanding what's not being said. And in this "deft and delightful" (Karen Joy Fowler) novel, the unsaid truths about everything from work and love to illness and death cast a deafening silence-and tower in the background like Mount Fuji itself.
Author
I spent three years in Japan (1990-1993), as the first American and first woman to serve as visiting professor of English at Shizuoka University. This experience informed my first novel, American Fuji, which was a book club pick of the Honolulu Advertiser and a nominee for the Kiriyama Prize. Recently, I earned an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts in poetry. My chapbook, Bicycle Lotus, won the 2015 Turtle Island Poetry Award. A second chapbook, Scavenger Hunt, came out in 2018. My first full book of poetry, Such Luck, is my newest book. I teach freshman comp and a few other stray courses at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, lead a reading group at a men's prison, and tramp around the woods in New Hampshire.
