Memoirs of a Gaijin: Emails from Japan

by Benjamin Hesse

Hello from Japan.Not much new here. My four-year-olds attacked me, my crazy female stalkers jumped on the desk and professed their love for me, my depressed coworkers fist-fought each other at the all-you-can-drink karaoke bar, and I have no idea what I ate yesterday but it was uncooked and squishy. Pretty much the usual. What's new from home?Ben took the teaching job in Japan because he wasn't quite ready to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. Instead, his efforts were put towards figuring out his new students, coworkers, and dinner. He is a "gaijin," the Japanese word for "foreigner." From festivals and temples to bicycles and cleaning supplies, Memoirs of a Emails from Japan is the one-year collection of emails and journals that chronicle Ben's experiences in the comedic and confusing country of Japan."A witty, honest work. Ben Hesse's Memoirs of a Gaijin should be a required read for those college grads who are contemplating the increasingly popular first 'real life' step of teaching English abroad."-C.J. Renner, author of Tried to Say

276 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 2007

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. This was terrible. I get the fact that it's a collection of emails between this guy and his family and friends while he was in Japan...but some of the stuff was so irrelevant and unrelated to anything important. Even more obnoxious was his attitude towards Japanese culture...everything different was deemed strange or even backwards, and it seems like this guy made no effort whatsoever to adjust to being in a new culture or to learn the language. I didn't care about his dumb interpersonal relationships or the random roommates he had....I wanted to hear about living in Japan, dammit! Seriously, this was just painful to read. If you want a guide to getting the LEAST out of your living abroad experience, take a leaf out of this guy's book/randomly collected nonsense. yeeesh.