Rating: 
Summary: Pearl of a book!
Review: Amelie you may have had to eat crow in Japan, but you've spit out a pearl. I've been meaning to read this book for some time and regret it took me so long. This is the kind of book I love. The interactions of the characters make plain the purpose of the book. No long-winded heavy-handed theme building here. She tells a mesmerizing story in a small book. I've always wondered if the Japanese truly think they're as culturally superior as rumor has it. I'm glad someone wrote a novel without sugar coating the cultural differences in thinking and behaving. Brava Amelie!
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful entertainment demanding a cautious read
Review: I am usually well inclined to fiction which attempts to portray the journey of characters through several aspects of different cultures and have a large collection of such books from many countries. Reading this particular book by a Belgian writer who lived in Japan however reminded me that one enters into this genre of displacement and cross-cultural ventures with both promises of entertainment and insight and perils of reinforcing stereotypes. I do not consider myself an expert on Japan, a country I have visited several times and several of whose novelists (Kawabata, Mishima, Endo, and others) I have read in translation. However, over the years I have followed in depth the experiences of many of my close non-Japanese friends who have carefully labored to study the language and culture, worked in similar Japanese organizations to the one described in this novel, and even married and settled in this land of persistently refractory attitudes to foreigners. I thus read this novel (which is short and easily completed in an hour or two) with mixed feelings. The characters are vivid and the plot is entertaining. The scenes are both horrific and hilarious, partly because they are also caricatured. This includes the final scene where the protagonist is forced to grovel in submitting her resignation from a Japanese import-export firm, lamenting that her "Western brain is inferior to the Japanese brain" to the delight of her Japanese nemesis. My dominant reaction was however one of horror with the stereotypes that the book simplistically designs and reinforces of Japanese attitudes toward women and foreigners. Like all stereotypes, there can always be an element of truth in them. I have certainly heard some of my (female) non-Japanese friends report experiences not unsimilar to those portrayed in this novel. However, this novel seems unrepentingly obsessed with them, and has no insightful descriptions of art, scenery, language, history, or other aspect of Japanese culture which might bring some balance and context to its outlandish caricatures. This may be a harsh judgment on a book which, after all, won the Grand Prix of the Academie Francaise and the Prix Internet du Louvre. But it is especially an appeal for this genre of fiction to achieve some verisimilitude to the culture(s) it portrays, and not hide behind the easy pretext of literary license or read-made stereotypes. On this score, this book should hardly be a best standard for its genre.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth the read
Review: I found the novella (in the original French) an interesting read, but I had to ask myself why a girl who was partly raised in Japan would have made such astounding faux pas. For example, even in Western society, would it not be polite and politic to accept a piece of chocolate from your boss (even if it is water melon flavored)? I kept having to attribute her maladroitness and incompetence to her young age, but if you make such allowances for the narrator, can you trust the narrator's viewpoint? Some of the tirades against Japanese culture came across as almost vengeful. Also, I would have liked to see more of a context to this story. Again, I kept wondering; what did this girl do in her free time? Toward the end, the narrator explains why there is no mention of her home life, but I felt like this was more of an excuse than a reason. I did admire much of the writing, but the classical references (so many of them) and some of the allegories seemed pretentious and out of place. In summary, I would have preferred either a straightforward satirical/comical account of her experiences, without the personal commentary, or else a more rounded and balanced work.
For those who enjoy reading fiction in French, I recommend the novella "La Classe de neige" by Emmanuel Carrere (sp?), a grippingly disturbing story expertly told through an imaginative and intuitive nine-year-old boy.
Rating: 
Summary: Exagerations and stereotyping for a big paycheck: well-done!
Review: I have been living and working in Japan for almost 8 years, in Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe, for Japanese and foreign companies. Like so many foreign residents here, I was shocked by the simplistic way Ms. Nothomb looks at Japanese society and business environment. A reader wrote he/she was shocked by the way Japanese punished her just because she showed some initiative. Come on!!! In any of our Western countries, an intern making half of her mistakes and showing half of her stupidity would have been fired in a matter of days! Saying she admires Japanese housewives for not committing suicide just shows how much she does not understand the country. DO NOT BELIEVE HER!!! I honnestly have trouble believing she does speak Japanese because her "analysis" is one that could have been written by any tourist trying to work there for 5 weeks: superficial, frustrated by the culture gap and lack of proper communication. I know that because I used to think her way during my first two years in Japan! Ms. Nothomb has just written an extremely easy and commercial book which aim was to shock and astonish people not familiar with Japan. Her book comforts readers in what they may have thought Japan was like, it is in NO WAY to be taken as an analysis or testimony by someone reliable. Entertaining because of the sterotypes yes (hence one star), but please, do not believe what she writes. I invite readers to stop and think about the huge mistakes she made when trying to work in a Japanese company and ask to reconsider if this writer can be considered smart enough to give a faithful picture of what Japanese society may be. This book is only HER testimony, it would be a pitty to draw conclusions about Japan from this simplistic book.
Rating:
Summary: It's not terrible.
Review: I have to admit, I don't read French, and that often makes a difference. Adriana Hunter translated. I don't know if what bothers me is Hunter's or Nothomb's fault.
I thought the book intelligent and interesting in its report on cultural clash (the narrator keeps getting shoved to a lower and lower corporate rung, because she's compassionate in Western terms). But its prose comes off a bit flat. If you like the prose, you might call it "elegant," in a very French way. But there's no "after-ring." For me, a great -- even very good novel -- shows a lot more than it says. English literature has a tradition of "richness" -- we expect rounded characters. Even mysterious characters -- people we don't understand fully or at all -- echo in our minds. We ask questions of them. Nothomb doesn't allow us to ask questions. The Japanese are a mystery, the cultural clash is ironic. It's as if she wrote out an essay outline and then found incidents that illustrated the thesis. But there's almost nothing else beyond that thesis. I will say there's a surprising irony concerning the head of the firm, but it's too little, too late. I read this book and enjoyed it, but I won't be re-reading it.
Rating:
Summary: Fear and Trembling:
Review: I really enjoyed this book and would really recommend it to anyone who asks. The story isn't as straightforward as it sounds; offcourse it's a book about cultural and social differences between the western world and the japanese way-of-life; but I'd say that only covers 50% of the story. The other 50% is more hidden, even will be percepted differently by different readers. It's that 50% that makes this book so good, amélie herself is so complex, so well formed that she becomes a story on her own. Sure, you can read this book like a national geographic documentary about japan and yes probably you wouldn't think it did it research very well. But I don't recommend reading it like that, because it's not a documentary at all. It helps knowing typical belgian or french literature, movies, or even their drawn books (bandes désignées). They breath out the ambience you also find in this book. A very mysterious social pattern viewed trough the eyes of a very complex and difficult to understand character. Those stories/characters can't be catched easily in one phrase. It takes a whole book and than you still might wonder what it's all about. Having said that I think Amélie herself is a little treasure. It's a view on japan, not the view of a basic western person, but the view of Amélie. She is living it, absorbing it and presenting it in such a unique way that you can't but like this book. I for one am not surprised it won various prices.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating & humorous view of Japan
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book, as a person who has always been fascinated with Eastern (especially Japanese) culture. This narrative was interesting, including cultural aspects of business, gender, work ethics, manners, and friendship. It was humorous and brief, an enjoyable and enriching read for a few hours.
Rating: 
Summary: Funny yet disturbing!
Review: In Nothom's caricature of Japanese corporate life, Belgian national Amelie begins by taking a new job at the import-export division of the Yomimoto Corporation. In almost no time, she finds herself slipping down the corporate ladder. Using an exaggerated sense of humor to poke fun at some of the absurdities of the Japanese work ethic, the author enlightens its readers to a Western mind's reaction to such a situation. What could be thought of by some as a scathing attack on Japanese corporate life seems to be just the author's examination of culture clash presented in a very entertaining manner.
Rating:
Summary: A Worthwhile Read
Review: My first outing with Ms Nothomb turned out to be quite the ride. This book presents a semi-autobiographical look at Nothomb's experiences in Japan's business world, and it is a journey like no other. Nothomb, a Belgian national born and raised in Japan, offered services as a French and English translator for a large Japanese business in the heart of Tokyo; before long, because of a series of cultural and business faux-pax, she finds herself on a year-long contract cleaning lavatories. Her plights are unenviable, to say the least. The reader may find it a bit difficult to empathize with Amelie, particularly when she kowtows to a culture that demands, by its own admission, foreign adherence to its whims when its own people are not expected to reciprocate in any kind. When Amelie apologizes to Fubuki, the pseudo-nemesis of the story's protagonist, for committing "grave mistakes" that should have otherwise been excused or overlooked, I actually cringed. It was not until the final page that I felt I had a good grip on the author's intent in those passages. Nothomb is an exquisite author, but I can only say this because of the magnificent translation provided by Adriana Hunter. Hunter gives us a sympathetic reading of Nothomb's nuances and intentions, and allows the reader to fill in the verbal gaps from the original French version. This is a highly respectable (and very short) work, and well worthy of even the most cautious reader's eye.
Rating:
Summary: Tarnished picture.
Review: This autobiographical novel gives us a very tarnished picture of the once so highly admired Japanese business culture and even of Japanese life in general.
In the course of one year Amélie Nothomb makes it from junior clerk to toilet cleanser. Why? By taking initiatives.
She gives us an impressive (very bleak) portrait of life in a Japanese business office: fear for colleagues, fear to lose a job or to miss a promotion, trembling before the hierarchy, bitter commpetition between the employees, suspicion and spying on everybody. As a matter of fact, the exact climate to stop all progress.
What are the employees waiting for after this terrible office hours: compulsive evening out with colleagues(?), hours in an overcrowded subway and finally an exhausted housewive. To quote another famous author: the air-conditioned nightmare.
She gives us an incisive picture of the condition of Japanese women: the author admires them because they don't commit suicide.
A compelling and eye-opening read.
For other impressive books on Japanese culture I recommend the works of Ian Buruma, and for the condition of Japanese women: Harriet Sergeant 'The old sow in the back room'.
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