Country of Origin: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: "Country of Origin" is an incredibly engaging book. It is a little bit of everything, police looking for a missing person, investigations into the Japanese sex industry, and the exploration of racial identity. "Country of Origin's" main character is Lisa Countryman. Lisa is half Japanese and half black and is a graduate student writing her thesis on the Japanese sex industry in Tokyo. Lisa was adopted from a Japanese orphanage by an American couple and has been struggling with her identity ever since.

Lisa is also a missing person. There are two men looking for her, Tom Hurley, a U.S. Foreign Service Officer who is rather immoral and dishonest, and Kenzo Ota, a decent Police Inspector and a hypochondriac.

The narrative in "Country of Origin" switches from the time of her arrival in Tokyo and then to that Tom and Kenzo as they look for her. I found "Country of Origin" to be an incredibly fascinating story. Lisa's search for identity and her fate in Tokyo, the descriptions of the sex industry and trade in Japan, and the tales of Tom and Kenzo all make this book a great read that I would highly recommend!


Rating:
Summary: (3.5) Lost souls in 1980¿s Tokyo
Review: A young American woman is missing in 1980's Tokyo, set against the political backdrop of the Iran hostage crisis and the upcoming presidential election in America. The author positions his characters in a city filled with foreigners and entrepreneurs. That each of the important protagonists has identity issues to deal with adds a racial element to the plot.

Although Lisa is of mixed heritage, she appears white and is viewed as a gaijin. Like many other young women, she has come to Tokyo to earn enough money to solve her financial problems, with or without the appropriate papers. From the first, Lisa runs into problems, each step of her journey more difficult and dangerous, she is unable to make friends or hold a job.

Countryman's case is assigned to the US Embassy, specifically to Tom Hurley, of mixed lineage himself. Hurley pursues a life of few commitments, not too interested in the American's disappearance, other than as a way to maintain contact with his affair of the moment, a woman married to a CIA operative working undercover at the American Embassy. Hurley's contact with his liaison in the Tokyo police department introduces the most likeable character in Country of Origin, Kenzo Ota. The detective is divorced, a bit paranoid and insecure, his career on a fast track to nowhere. Using the few leads supplied by Hurley, Ito eventually blunders into solving the mystery behind Lisa's disappearance, changing the direction of the story.

The characters interact in an international, complex society, a city filled with energetic pursuit of enterprise. However, Americans are not particularly popular in Tokyo in the 1980's and there is a subtle indictment of the United States and the manner in which this culture permeates Japanese life, complete with rock music, clothing and the ubiquitous brand names that identify everything American.

The mystery is particularly intriguing because of the author's emphasis on personal isolation. Lack of identity breeds discontent, at least insofar as these characters fail to make peace with their mixed heritages, as personified by Lisa Countryman. Beginning with the missing girl, each person has personal demons, whether fear, lack of commitment or a sense of disconnection. Mixed racial identities complicate the protagonist's decisions, the need for acceptance vs. personal morality. Luan Gaines/2004

Rating:
Summary: One of best reads for literary-mystery fiction
Review: COUNTRY OF ORIGIIN was a great read: a beautifully written story with considerable color of place and intriguing tension turns. I'm assigning it for my fiction writing class, it's that good. A rare find: one of those packages you get from Amazon.com that offer you a stimulating week--no stop reading once I started.

Rating:
Summary: Decent Read, Interesting, But No Page Turner
Review: I bought this book after listening to a piece about it on NPR. While clearly a proven writer, Don Lee falls short of creating spellbinding drama. The book serves as an interesting vehicle for Lee to comment on Japanese society in particular and our whole societal hangups about race, ethnicity and nationality in general. Certainly, the book will cause you to reflect on these issues. Lee succeeds in conveying a real sense of 1980 Japanese culture (I presume, based upon his personal experience and research, it is objectively accurate); however, I found his character arcs weak, his story disjointed, and his dramatic conflict lacking. The book never achieves a page turning crescendo, there is no climax, and the denouement is a fizzle. Maybe it's just too cerebral for me. Please pass me the Grisham.

Rating:
Summary: Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy
Review: Lisa Countryman, one of the three POVs in this troubled novel, is a multiracial doctoral student at Berkeley who is working as a club hostess in Tokyo. She has a larger agenda, but it will take the reader awhile to figure that out. She becomes involved with various questionable men, including a local CIA spook. The other gaijin protagonist is Tom Hurley, a junior diplomatic officer who's just floating through life. Then there's Kenzo Ota, a not very competent police inspector who becomes involved in trying to find out what happened to Lisa when she disappears. For some reason, the story is set in 1980, and easily the best part of the book is the look Lee gives us at the shadowy world of the Tokyo sex trade -- though the Japanese have a much more tolerant attitude toward such things than Americans. The plot, however, is perfunctory through much of the book, with absolutely no foreshadowing, so when Lee begins wrapping things up in the last couple of chapters, the solutions he springs on the reader are a series of rather unsatisfying surprises. Lisa herself is the only character toward whom one can feel any sympathy. Hurley is a total schmuck completely lacking in redeeming qualities. Kenzo is a naive, neurotic loner without a clue about the society in which he lives, and the spook is simply manipulative, as are many of the supporting cast. The background is interesting but the ideas are poorly developed and the author's style is almost amateurish.

Rating:
Summary: "The search for love and kinship"
Review: Part mystery, part character study, and part treatise on the ramifications of race, Country of Origin is probably one of the most unique books to come out this year. With a stark, concise, yet distinctively competent style, Lee has written an engaging and quite illuminating story set against the background of Japan in the early nineteen eighties when there is a lot going on in the world - the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the Olympic boycott, and the Iranian hostage crisis. The story centers on the disappearance of the young American mixed-race girl Lisa Countryman, and the efforts to find her by the American Consular officials and the local police in Tokyo. The narrative cleverly jumps backwards and forwards in time - from the night of her disappearance, told from Lisa's point of view, to the present to where Tom Hurley, the young consular official is looking for her. Throughout this all the characters, whether mixed race American or Japanese wrestle with the questions of race and identity, and the whole effect is like a type of dark, foreboding Lost In Translation with America clumsily, and at times, not very successfully interacting with Japanese culture.

Lisa is in fact both neither white nor straightforwardly American - she is of African- American and Korean heritage - and it is her quest for her real origins among the sleaze of Japan's sex trade that ultimately get her into danger. Lisa wants to recognize where she came from and who she was; "she wants to have a history." When she tries to claim racial solidarity with a group, people don't believe her and she ends up being labeled as a "radical-chic colour of the month." The truth about what happens to her turns out to be unfortunate, and also rather sad; it has more to do with her own angst, stupidity and irresponsibility than with the maneuverings of any malevolent exploiter.

Much of The world in Country of Origin centers on petty bureaucracies of the United States Embassy in Tokyo. The Americans who work in the embassy are assertively individualistic, and they constantly confront a Japanese conformist community that is hidebound by tradition. But beneath the surface of American confidence lurks extraordinary anxiety about identity. The characters are all insecure about themselves and each other, and no one appears they seem. Tom Hurley is half-white and half-Korean, but he routinely lies and says he's Hawaiian. Tom's fellow officers at the embassy, Benny, who is black, and Jorge, who is Chicano, complain endlessly about race. Julia, the woman who Tom is having an affair with is an American wife of a Japanese CIA operative, and she misleadingly tells Tom that she is privately schooled and from old money. The Japanese are conveyed as culturally xenophobic - Kenzo Ota labels whites as "gaijin" who emanate a ''butter stink'' from eating too much dairy. Ota, a compelling and fascinating character, is the middle-aged Japanese detective, who recently stigmatized by divorce, is convinced that something sinister has happened to Lisa.

The novel conveys a country in the throws of a profound change, and a society that is unavoidably bound by loyalty. Loyalty is the basis of the Japanese economic system and "is behind the structure of global alliances between their government bodies and private corporations." The most interesting aspect of Country of Origin is the account of Lisa's months in Japan leading up to her disappearance - the author describes some fascinating locales making the reader feel as though they are right at the heart of Japanese nightlife. There are a many surprises as the novel concludes, although some readers may the final twist in Lisa's story rather anti-climactic and emotionally somewhat lightweight and predictable. Mike Leonard August 04.


Rating:
Summary: Super
Review: This novel works on all levels-as a mystery, as a literary novel, and as a sharp examination of late-20th-century Japan. Don Lee has written a terrific, engrossing story which will be enjoyed by anyone who loves a good book.

In 1980, graduate student Lisa Countryman goes to Japan to work on her doctoral thesis. She's half Japanese, half-black, a Berkeley grad who hopes to learn more about her own background through her research. This path turns risky, and at the opening of the novel, Lisa has already disappeared.

The US Embassy official assigned to Lisa's case is on shaky ground himself. Tom Hurley is on his own risky path, hiding his own mixed heritage as he pursues an affair with the wife of a CIA official. A man of such compromised morals wants nothing to do with a disappearance of another bi-racial American, especially one who may have been involved in the Japanese sex underground. Lisa's case falls to Kenzo Ota, a Tokyo detective with so many neuroses that he commands no respect. He gets Lisa's case because in the eyes of his co-workers, the disappearance of such a person is of no consequence whatsoever.

Don Lee weaves Lisa's story through Ota's search for her with fluidity and skill. His pointed look at Japanese society in 1980 is intelligent and interesting, with the additional intriguing reflection on the US reaction to bi-racial Americans. "Country of Origin" is completely satisfying and I look forward to Don Lee's next novel.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Look at Sex and Racial Homegeneity
Review: Where in the world is Lisa Countryman? Lisa, a twenty-something American woman of mixed-heritage seems to have disappeared after a trip to Japan. As the plot unfolds in "Country of Origin," we learn that Lisa is a Ph.D. candidate looking to write about Japan's matriarchal society. Her research (and need for money) leads her down the dark path of the country's underground sex world in the early eighties, where men pay wads of cash for female companionship. Is it the reason for her disappearance? That's what Kenza Ota would like to know.

Ota, a bumbling detective, is given the task of finding the whereabouts of Countryman. But his lack of skill either leads him to dead ends or two steps behind. Though Ota suffers from the humiliation of being a terrible detective, he takes the Countryman case very seriously since it could redeem him. Meanwhile, Ota deals with the crisis in his personal life, including a divorce that occurred fourteen years ago that left him single and celibate. When his ex shows up in Japan with her teenage son, he is convinced that he is the boy's father. He follows the boy while working up the nerve to speak to him.

Then there's Tom Hurley. Tom, an embassy service officer, gets involved in the case when Lisa's sister contacts him from America. When Tom begins an affair with Julia Tinsley, the wife of a CIA agent, Lisa Countryman's case becomes the highlight of their conversations. Once he learns this, he digs deeper into the case, not because he truly cares but because he wants to keep Julia interested.

This book is not only about the mysterious vanishing of Lisa Countryman, it is also about race, gender, sex, and Japanese culture. The underlying theme of the Japanese's obsession with racial homogeneity is eye-opening and mind-boggling. The underground sex world is described in titillating detail. Author Don Lee, who also wrote "Yellow," is a gifted writer who is best when taking a subject and rolling with it like in this passage:

"Kenzo had always been rail-thin, as was Yumiko, but Simon was fat. Roly-poly, flesh-bobbing fat. Trundling, waddling fat. Wheezing, heaving, lard-ass fat. American fat. What had they been feeding him over there in Atlanta, Georgia? Kenzo could only imagine. Mounded, gelatinous meals, like chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, white biscuit gravy."

Though some of the material may be considered offensive (Africans look like monkeys, Caucasians stink of dairy products, and lighter skin in considered better than a darker hue), it does not take away from the fact that this is an intriguing read. Reading "Country of Origin" is like riding a time machine to Japan's underworld in the late seventies and early eighties. "Country of Origin" is worth the read.