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Book Review: 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan (Davidson)

Writing about other cultures is a tricky thing. How do you describe the insights you have about yourself and about your native culture and the new culture you are experiencing without overgeneralizing and making yourself seem really shallow? It seems obvious that even spending a whole year in another country isn't the same as growing up in that culture, but it seems like it should be long enough to be able to understand some of the fundamental differences in cultures. This book deals with a lot of these issues, since it is written by an American who goes to teach English at a Japanese university for a year, and at first I thought it wasn't handling them well. The book is mostly in chronological order, so it begins with descriptions of the author's first experiences as a gaijin teacher in Japan, and it falls into some of the traps without really seeming to acknowledge them. The writing style was entertaining enough to keep me going, but I was afraid I wouldn't be able to read too much in a sitting without getting a little frustrated. Time spent at a prestigious all-women's university in Tokyo is not a good way to get a deep understanding of all of Japanese culture. But as the narrative continued, she began to address more of these issues and after she came back to the U.S. the book became much more interesting. Instead of just being a travel memoir, it became a much more personal story about how a person can try to enjoy parts of multiple cultures and learn to live with some of the impossibilities of this. Subsequent visits to Japan helped her achieve a more multifaceted view of Japanese society, both from the environments she was able to see and the internal perspective changes as her reasons for visiting changed. And the book wound up holding my interest enough to get me to read the entire thing in a single day of airport travel. I think it did a good job of telling a story, giving a little insight into Japanese culture (although some of it seems dated by the mentions of the "Japanese economic miracle") and American culture, and providing a little inspiration to pursue some of those crazy dreams.