Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures Paperback – April 6, 1999

Read Kyoko Mori's Polite Lies.The Dream of Water and Yarn.A must to understand the Japanese especialy expats.

I didn't warm to this book right away. The opening chapters were rather dark and depressing; Mori's mother's suicide is introduced as casually as a shopping trip (which was what Mori was doing when the event occurred). What surprised me was how much the later chapters resonanated with me. My mother is from Japan, and from what I can judge, a contemporary of Mori's own mother. The things I have not been able to name but which remains an intrinsic part of who I am and how I behave came through in Mori's voice. The hidden meaning behind our words, the active avoidance of social confrontation, the patriarchal and rigid expectations between the sexes...flooded me with memories. "No" means "yes" unless said three times; mom ordering me to avoid eye contact with strangers behaving weirdly on a public street; mom's cousins who ran a family-run business in Japan that (eventually) ran into the ground when the male boss (a brother) died leaving his unmarried, spinster sisters to struggle on without him. Culture may make an evolutionary change as Japan becomes less homogenous, but for Mori, and others like us, our behaviors have already been prescribed by an earlier cultural edict.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Mori, as befits a writing instructor, writes beautifully. Her essays have a wonderful flow about them and are peppered with interesting details. I think they would serve as great instructional pieces on writing personal essays.However, I found some un-evenness in the actual content of what Dr. Mori had to say. Her observations about what it's like to be a person caught between or maybe with one foot in each of two very different cultures struck me as very true and perceptive, as this is also my life story.The problem is when Dr. Mori talks about Japan. She is one of a fairly typical group of adult-immigrants to the US, who moved here because they disliked their life in their home country. And since she has been here for 20 years and has been very successful and lived a full life, all her stories about Japan are going to have a goal of saying 'I am so glad I left Japan.' In addition, as the other reviewers have said, Dr. Mori had an extremely unhappy childhod in Japan, which probably colors all of her perceptions of that country. I found her descriptions of her feelings in flying closer to Japan on a rare visit there very revealing -- to her, Japan is not a home, not even a happy place, but instead a place full of terrible memories that she is only too happy to have escaped from.Nonetheless, I think this book is worth reading both for its writing and its observations about being a person who is bicultural by choice.

This sad and quiet book succeeds on several levels. Dr. Mori offers a concrete portrait of the Japan of her childhood and of her withdrawn and grieving adolescence. She provides hundreds of interesting visual, auditory, and emotional details - using a disciplined structure. This is a story that has a chaotic event at its core, and yet there is no chaos in the retelling.In an explanation of traditional clothing colors in Japan, Dr. Mori explains that girls and younger woman may wear pastels, bright pinks, and reds, but as a woman ages, browns and blues predominate, giving way to the grays and dark blues of middle age and beyond. Mori's mother committed suicide at 41, when her only daughter was twelve years old. Dr. Mori: "She never completed her transition into the brown-and-dark-blue middle age."Dr. Mori does not solicit your tears, but you will want to hold that bereft little girl in your arms.Her father, a largely absent man whom she barely knew, remarried. She became an eagle-eyed observer, but Japan was a society and a country that could not hold her, and did not. She left immediately after high school. She contrasts Japanese culture and customs with the genuinely "nice" midwestern American milieu that she eventually adopted, gladly, as her home. (There's even a discussion of the ubiquitous Jell-O mold.) It's a very interesting tour, led by a woman who is searching for meaning, intent on learning more, and is a compassionate interpreter. Not a word is wasted in this narrative.The meanings of colors, of emotional states, of visual and auditory symbols, of cities and crowds, fashion, guilt and obligation, of ways of speaking (form and content), as well as food, furniture, creativity, women's roles and even proscribed registers for female speech - are decoded, deconstructed, and analyzed by Dr. Mori. Her tone is quietly thoughtful and compassionate, though deeply critical. Her memories of her life with her mother, and of childhood and adolescence, inform some of her discussions. This ambitious book attempts the work, perhaps, of two books: comparative conversations about Japanese culture, and a daughter's grief at losing her beautiful mother. In that sense Dr. Mori took a risk with this book. I liked it very much.

A book that should be read by every business person that ever has dealings with Japan and Japanese. The book (at least in the beginning) gives an accurate description of the pyrimid like quality of the Japanese language and Japanese customs. It conveys a sense of the Japanese high regard for formalities and their need to be addressed by title and rank. It is as if they are from another century. The book is actually an autobiography of Ms. Mori's life. I got the feeling she has a very hard side to her. Anyway, great book especially its conveyance of the Japanese culture to the world.

I loved this book. I am not surprised that there are bad reviews. Some Japanese and japanophile readers could be offended by the revelations about Japanese culture. But, Kyoko is giving the reader tremendous insight into the social structure of Japan. She points out quite a few similarities to American Midwest culture. Best of all, her stories draw the reader in and keep reader wanting more.

Got just what I expected, interesting book gives insight into a Japanese mind.