Tokyo Fiancée

A slight novel, but perceptive and crisply written, Amélie Nothomb's Tokyo Fiancée turns one of the standard narratives of expat fiction—Western male goes off to Far East, meets exotic native woman, cross-cultural high-jinks ensue—on its head by making the active, if crude, Westerner a female and the passive and mysterious Easterner a Japanese man. Some of the set pieces about Japan won't seem all that fresh to those who know the country and the literature to which it has given rise, but other events Nothomb describes, those not experienced by all foreigners, but which—this is most definitely an autobiographical novel—evidently were experienced by Nothomb, are quite delightful, particularly her account of getting caught in a snow storm and nearly freezing to death on Kumotoriyama which, as Nothomb doesn't mention, is, at about 2000 meters, the highest peak in Tokyo.