Country of Origin by Don Lee

This book was recommended to me by Deena last June. She and I overlap somewhat with books, although she is more of a fan of mysteries than I am. Her comment on it was that she liked it, but it was "nothing spectacular." I think that's a fair assessment.

The book is about an American who disappears in Tokyo and the various people connected to her life. From the jacket, this book purports to be not only a good, old-fashioned mystery, but also a search for identity. I did not find that to be true. True, many of the characters were multi-racial and struggling with identity. And Lee did include some colorful descriptions of various groups within Japan. "The Japanese were yasashi, wet," he writes, "They stuck to one another in tribes like wet, glutinous rice. They were warm, gentle, emotional, whereas Westerners were dry and hard and individualistic, like thir rice, which fell apart into solitary grains."

But as a whole, the struggles with identity and race and background were not fully enough explored to make for good reading. The book was too pulpy to be an identity book and too poetic for a mystery. I was also distressed by some of the depictions of the sex trade in Japan, even though I'm not typically a book prude.

The narrative itself read quickly and the mystery aspect of the story was reasonably compelling. I also liked that as a mystery, it was possible to play along with the characters and start figuring out different aspects of the story.

I did enjoy the humor written into the book. The main character collects idioms incorrectly munged into Japanese, and her list of them is hilarious. I also appreciated how well-developed some of the characters were. Contained in one of their backstories was a great description of someone's thoughts about a huge mistake he made, "Occasionally he thought what had happened in Sao Paulo had changed him, had disrupted his development from the person he had wantd to be in to the person he was now..."

Overall, I think that this book needed to more fully commit to being either a great mystery or a great novel. I would most strongly compare this to another mystery I was not crazy about, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. However, I read a lot of novels set in other countries that address identity, so I'm open to the idea that I am spoiled that way.