In this laugh-out-loud travelogue, an average American man journeys to a country unlike any other: 1980s Japan
Early one morning, Mike Halsey leaves his sleeping girlfriend and his house deep in the woods to go out and buy the morning paper. His favorite deli is closed, so he keeps driving and winds up on an unfamiliar lakeside road. Then it hits him: the old wanderlust. The last time it struck, he ended up on the coast of Finland.
This time, Mike heads east—to Japan. He doesn’t like sushi all that much and has no idea what he’ll do when he arrives. Luckily, he makes a new friend on the plane. Bill Atenabe invites Mike to stay with his family in Tokyo—“We’ve got plenty of room by Japanese standards,” he claims—and the two pals are soon sampling all that makes the Land of the Rising Sun unique, from Peeping Tom tours to department store attendants who dust you off before you step into an elevator to computers with a sense of irony.
Mike quickly discovers, however, that not all is as happy as it seems in the Atenabe household. Bill’s wife is having an affair with a bamboo salesman, his son wants to give up a promising academic career to become a talent scout for a modeling agency, and his war-hero father is being forced into retirement. When Bill contemplates an act of desperation, Mike talks some good old American common sense into his friend and discovers the real reason for his own journey to Japan.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bruce Jay Friedman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
