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Sushi Daze is one of those trendy, coming of age novels where the protagonist always knows what to say, even when they don’t know how to live their life. It follows the antics of Jamie, an otherwise spiritually lost individual, through his own personal self-discovery teaching in Japan. Jamie applies to BIGSUN, a Japanese ESL school, on a whim and lies his way into Japan, where he finds it’s not quite what he expected. Small rooms, borderline psychopathic roommates, students with various eclectic tastes, and dare I say it … discovering love? Wanky? Sure, but it’s not all bad. Rob Payne reads like a Douglas Coupland wannabee. He isn’t bad, and it’s an entertaining tale, but it just isn’t bizarre enough, moving enough, or trendy enough to really hit the spot. I enjoyed it, but without spoiling the ending, it seems that there isn’t really one. The whole book is left hanging, with Jamie never really having the epiphany he needs to complete the arc. It’s almost as if some mad scientist took Neal Stephenson’s inability to finish a story and merged it with the more uninspired writings of Coupland. Payne’s descriptions of Japan are only really going to appeal to those who haven’t been there and don’t know the first thing about it. 10 years ago, they probably would have been edgy. Now, they’re just not edgy enough - he misses out on broad swathes of “interesting” cultural facets, ranging from the otaku to gameshows / personalities to even Shinto spiritualism. While I’m nowhere near an expert on Japan, even I’m aware of what he missed - the book reads somewhat like someone who either only brushed the surface of Japan, never really exploring off the beaten path, cocooned in their ex-pat community, or someone who wrote through relatively superficial research. Brief nods are made to some cultural quirks, but that’s it. The characters are all pretty consistently one-dimensional - while attempts were made to develop some of the characters (notably Eldon and Cassandra, his rapidly degenerating roommate and love interest, respectively), they’re just not fully enough explored to make them anything but caricatures. It’s not a bad book, it’s just that there’s better out there. The fundamentals are all there, he just doesn’t develop them enough to make it a must-read. Which, to be blunt, is a shame - the protagonist is interesting and his personal journey has promise. I had high hopes, especially after enjoying the Bangkok 8 books by John Burdett and the Feng Shui Detective series by Nury Vittachi, but it seems Payne just didn’t quite hit his stride. I’ll probably read his other major book, Working Class Zero, at some stage, but it’s not high on my list of priorities. |
Recommended? "no"