Don Lee Country of Origin

Country of Origin

Don Lee

Norton, Apr 2005, $13.95, 315 pp.

ISBN: 039332706X

In 1980 University of Berkley graduate student Lisa Countryman, a half-Japanese, half-black American, conducts her dissertation research in Tokyo on the brutal societal conformity of bar girls. Lisa also has a personal agenda to learn more about who she is as a mixed race person.

Needing work, Lisa finds employment as a hostess girl at a Tokyo men's club. Eventually she vanishes and her disappearance comes to the attention of American Junior Diplomat Tom Hurley, who has no interest in a half-breed's disappearance except as a nuisance that takes him away from the embassy pool and cocktails, which in his mind is more important to a purebred Hawaiian that he insists he is. In fact he is embarrassed by his roots of being a hybrid half-Korean, half white. Police Inspector Kenzo Ota, who spent three miserable teen years in Missouri, investigates the missing American, feeling strongly this case could make his career if he can solve it fast.

This is an interesting look at racial relationships told through the three key characters whose convergence centers on the disappearance. The entertaining story line grips the reader from the moment that Lisa's vanishing is reported and never slows down as Tom half heartedly and Ota fully are engaged in learning what happened to her. Though minor in terms of the plot, the Tokyo embassy is in bright contrast to the stark Iranian hostage situation that is occurring at the same time. Don Lee uses a Japanese police procedural to provide a strong look at is racial origins.

Harriet Klausner