Margins
Sayonara Bar book cover
Sayonara Bar
2005
First Published
3.39
Average Rating
370
Number of Pages
At the center of the story is Mary, a graduate student from England who has taken a job at a hostess lounge in Osaka, Japan, so that she can earn money to travel the globe. Unfortunately, she has fallen in love with Yuji, Mama-san's son, who has an uneasy alliance with the Yakuza. Watanabe, a somewhat diffident cook, who works at the Sayonara Bar, has also taken an interest in Mary, and supposedly he can see into a fourth dimension, a manga-infused dimension which allows to see danger before it happens. And then there is Mr. Sato who has become a regular at Sayonara Bar, as he tries to escape his wife's ghost. When Yuji crosses the Yakuza, it has dire consequences for them all, and their lives become irrevocably intertwined in this wonderfully imagined debut novel.
Avg Rating
3.39
Number of Ratings
161
5 STARS
16%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
34%
2 STARS
19%
1 STARS
2%
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Author

Susan Barker
Susan Barker
Author · 5 books

Susan Barker (born 1978) is a British novelist. She has an English father and a Chinese-Malaysian mother and grew up in East London. She is the author of the novel Sayonara Bar, which Time magazine called "a cocktail of astringent cultural observations, genres stirred and shaken, subplots served with a twist" and The Orientalist and the Ghost, both published by Doubleday (UK) and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her third novel The Incarnations (Doubleday UK, July 2014) is about a taxi driver in contemporary Beijing and interwoven with tales from the Tang dynasty, the invasion of Genghis Khan, the Ming dynasty, the Opium War, and the Cultural Revolution. While writing The Incarnations she spent several years living in Beijing, researching modern and imperial China.

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