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American Fuji - by Sara Backer (Paperback)
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About this item
Highlights
- Japan itself is the comic hero of this sweet and funny, sad and inspiring novel.
- About the Author: Sara Backer was the first American and the first woman to serve as visiting professor of English at Japan's Shizuoka University.
- 416 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Women
Description
About the Book
Mount Fuji is the backdrop for this story of Gaby Stanton, an American professor living in Japan, who helps Alex Thorn investigate the death of his son at Shizuyama University.
Book Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Sara Backer was the first American and the first woman to serve as visiting professor of English at Japan's Shizuoka University. An early draft of American Fuji was named a finalist in the James Jones First Novel Competition, and a play she wrote as a Djerassi artist in residence was chosen for performance at the Edward Albee Theatre Conference in June 2000. A published poet and short-story writer, Backer lives in New Hampshire.