Sweet Daruma : A Japan Satire by Janice Valerie Young (iUniverse)

Sweet Daruma is an irreverent story set in Japan as told through the eyes of Magda who leaves her native Canada and her globalization-protesting boyfriend to teach English conversation...or so she thinks. 

Magda is met at the airport by a man who calls himself September, his actual name being Jun which sounds like “June” in English. He changed his name because he felt Jun sounded too “trite”. Magda is whisked off to use her English abilities right away, but not at a conversation school. September takes her to a site on the Chuo Line and says there is man who is trying to commit Chuocide, suicide by getting hit by the Chuo Line railway. 

Magda discovers that she has joined the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team named after Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables”, a book that is popular with many Japanese. From there, Magda meets the colorful characters she works with and has one zany adventure after another. How all these characters intertwine borders on the absurd.

Anne Lajeunesse is a fellow Canadian who “had been in Japan long enough to know that those who accused her of treating Japan as if it were a giant theme park for Westerners had obviously never lived in Japan”. She is the owner and creator of the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team. 

Kate is another Canadian who also works for the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team who tells Magda that one of the first things Magda should do is “Go out as soon as you can and get a vibrator” because she continues, “You won’t be having any sex during your time in Japan.” 

Magda must deal with the owner of a dry cleaner called Morimoto, a couple of wannabe Yakuzas, a pair of yamambas (a fashion trend set by Japanese high school girls in the mid-’90s where they applied dark tans and white lipstick), who are also amateur entrepreneurs selling their own urine, two militant English language school teachers and a mute, one-armed monkey named Kagemusha. 

Hirohisa is a former Christian who lives in the same building occupied by the Anne of Grey team and is also the owner of Kagemusha. He is currently designing stackable apartments that are shaped like a daruma, a hollow round doll that is often displayed for good luck or good fortune. It is an act committed by Hirohisa which sets off a series of events in which all the characters would cross paths. 

A satire is supposed to be humorous but the book reads more like an expat airing their grievances about everything they don’t like about Japan - the crowded trains, the gropers, the over-saturation of English conversation schools, enjo-kosai (teenage prostitution) and the like. It’s as if the writer wanted to exaggerate everything that is bad about Japan and weave it into a story. Sometimes it works but most of the time it falls flat. 

I really tried to enjoy this story but found many of the Japanese pop cultural references to be dated and obscure. The writing is simple and easy to understand but many of the situations are beyond absurd, rendering this satire into a piece of juvenile fiction a high student may have written for their creative writing class. ~Ernie Hoyt