THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9606030211
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: 71 lines
AUDREY HEPBURN'S NECK
ALAN BROWN
Pocket Books. 290 pp. $21.
Toshi, the protagonist of Alan Brown's first novel, is 9 when his mother takes him to see Audrey Hepburn in ``Roman Holiday.''
From that moment, life is a romance with all things American. The world on-screen makes sense; there things turn out OK in the end. At home, he's puzzled by his father's brooding silence, his mother's unexplained depressions. Sleeping on a mat between them, he hears them toss, turn, mumble, strangers to him and each other. Then his mother leaves, to work in a nearby inn. His father won't discuss it.
By 23, Toshi has left the isolation of his fishing village and his father's noodle shop for the urban zoo of Tokyo. But the mystery of his parents' doomed marriage shadows him like a stubborn stray. He's overwhelmed by the city; the U.S. influence is everywhere, though in the Pacific crossing the names have undergone a strange change: Let's California Beer Garden, Fly Sexy Snack Bar, My Charming Home furnishings. And the Hysteric Glamour Building, home of the Very Romantic English Academy.
Toshi, now an illustrator for the popular comic strip ``Chocolate Girl,'' is still enamored of all things American. He enrolls in intermediate English Conversation class.
His instructor is New Yorker Jane Borden (``like the ice cream, like the cow, like Lizzie who chopped up her father with an axe,'' she tells the bewildered class). On the first day she pauses before Toshi's desk and tells him to imagine he's about to pick up a beautiful woman in the Metropolitan Museum. ``Your eyes meet. Your heart beats fast. Your palms sweat. . . . What do you say to her?''
Classmates wait breathlessly for his reply. Toshi (heart beating, palms sweating), wondering if this is American-style education, says stiffly, ``It is nice to meet you.''
Jane abruptly asks him out. Writes Brown: ``This is what he likes best yet dreads most about American women: You can never tell, even with the ones you think you know, what they're going to do next.''
His teacher is full of surprises, violently passionate, or perhaps just enamored of violence, nearly devouring Toshi during their first sexual encounter. He staggers from her apartment bruised, bleeding, craving more. Soon he's over his head in an obsessive relationship that Jane has clearly rehearsed - often. Finally, when things get weird in a local cemetery, Toshi breaks it off. But Americans named Borden are not dismissed easily.
There's also Toshi's gay American friend Paul, a huge red-haired copywriter who wants to seduce him, but settles for being his friend. Toshi serves as a sympathetic shoulder for Paul's laments about unhappy relationships with young Japanese opportunists.
Then Toshi meets Lucy, an American composer whose neck rivals Audrey Hepburn's. He thinks she likes him too - or is he just misunderstanding American intentions again? And is Jane the mysterious arsonist who's trying to burn down his apartment?
Brown's novel seems set in a near-future Japan, for the often amazing details seem spacily high-tech, even for a country known for electronic wizardry. As Toshi passes through the turnstile of the subway, an automatic blood presssure machine cuff encircles his arm, pronounces him fit, and an electronic voice advises ``work hard tomorrow.''
Audfrey Hepburn's Neck is America viewed through Japanese eyes, a culture clash of major proportions. Brown's characters are familiar as people we know, or would like to know, or at least (in some cases) would like to be warned about. The author's off-beat humor and affection for his quirky creations glow like sparks on the pages - which readers will turn compulsively, shaking their heads in amazement, hungry for the next surprise. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern
Shore. Her second novel, ``Ibo Key,'' will be published later this year. by CNB