Marina and Carolyn, both twenty-two and just out of college, decide to teach English in Japan for a year. Marina is, in a way, running away from her father’s suicide the previous year, and Carolyn simply doesn’t know what to do with her life yet, and this year off delays thinking about the future. On these very rocky grounds, they get placed together in a rural part of Japan’s snow country, where they encounter vast amounts of culture shock.

I really enjoyed this book! Watrous did a fantastic job of making me feel like I, too, was an outsider visiting Japan and bumbling about while trying to figure out the rules and regulations that made up this new-to-me world. It felt very claustrophobic, with way too many laws to try to memorize, being unable to speak to most people, and even when you can, it’s limited and choppy. It reminded me of my time in France, except that there was a lot less for me to learn there!

What really made this book special for me, though, what raised it above a traditional culture-clash sort of novel, was the relationship between Marina and Carolyn and how it was handled. Both women, if you wanted to label them, could technically be called bisexual, but the label seems so boxed-in and doesn’t really fit either of them. Marina has always dated men before in her life, but she becomes attracted to Carolyn when they meet in grief counseling. Carolyn has mostly dated women, but has been with men from time to time, and has a lot of issues with commitment. She doesn’t want the two of them to share an apartment when they move to Japan, feeling like it will put too much pressure on their fairly new relationship, and she wants an open relationship so that she’s free to let her desire out on anyone. Marina is used to a more traditional way of thinking about relationships, so she tries to do everything she can to keep Carolyn to herself, including tricking her into sharing the apartment with her.

The fact that these two women are in a relationship is not the central focus of the book, which is what really interested me. Yes, they’re together, but this isn’t a book about a lesbian relationship. It’s about a woman dealing with grief, and two women trying to hold themselves together as they suffer through massive change in their lives. Their relationship is obviously doomed from the beginning, for many reasons: their age, the very short time they’d been together before being thrown into this stressful situation, the conflict of their personalities, the shared apartment, each of their personal issues. Like any other couple, same-sex or not, they grow apart, have communication issues, and eventually fragment. Carolyn says at one point that most relationships die, and this is one of them. I like that it wasn’t the main focus, that Marina and Carolyn and their relationship with each other was treated as a normal, human thing, and not like something we have to stare at and pick apart because of it’s GLBT-ness. It’s the sort of GLBT book I’ve been seeking out lately – one that involves GLBT characters but not necessarily GLBT themes. One that states the obvious: people in same-sex relationships lead normal lives that don’t revolve around their sexuality, just like people in straight relationships.

The book instead focuses primarily on Marina’s inability to cope with her father’s death, and all the mistakes she makes as she’s trying to integrate herself into rural Japanese society. It explores the lives of many of the people she meets, from the mother with an autistic son, to the Korean girl who cares so much about a sick rabbit, to the teenage girl forced to have an abortion because sex education isn’t taught in schools and she doesn’t know how to prevent pregnancy. There is so much in here and Watrous weaves it together so well!

I’m really glad I decided to read this one, particularly because I was unsure of it before I picked it up. Amy said in her review that she wasn’t sure if the book was GLBT-friendly, particularly because Marina says something near the end that can be interpreted as saying she only dated Carolyn out of grief. I didn’t interpret it that way, though. Coming from the point of view of someone who is bisexual, I thought Marina’s attraction to Carolyn was genuine. Will she probably prefer to be with men for most of her relationships? Probably, yes. She always had before, just like Carolyn will probably mostly be with women, rarely dating men, though she will sometimes. But I see sexuality as existing on a more fluid scale than just straight, gay, and half-and-half bisexual. There is so much more to it than that, and I thought this book really brought many of those elements to life. It felt more real to me, therefore, than most books about GLBT characters, and I really appreciated and loved it for that.