Product Description

According to ancient Japanese protocol, foreigners deigning to approach the emperor did so only with fear and trembling. Terror and self-abasement conveyed respect. Amélie, our well-intentioned and eager young Western heroine, goes to Japan to spend a year working at the Yumimoto Corporation. Returning to the land where she was born is the fulfillment of a dream for Amélie; working there turns into comic nightmare.

Alternately disturbing and hilarious, unbelievable and shatteringly convincing, Fear and Trembling will keep readers clutching tight to the pages of this taut little novel, caught up in the throes of fear, trembling, and, ultimately, delight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #293841 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Review
"[A] polished little satire." -The Wall Street Journal -- c

Review

About the Author
Belgian by nationality, Amelie Nothomb was born in Kobe, Japan, and currently lives in Paris. She is the author of eight novels, translated into fourteen languages. Fear and Trembling won the Grand Prix of the Academie Francaise and the Prix Internet du Livre.

Customer Reviews

This book is not a work of fiction!
As an American who worked in Japan in the 1980's, I read this book with a special sense of recognition. You may think that what the protagonist experiences in this book is highly exaggerated. Believe me, it is not! This is a very enjoyable read for those who can empathize with what it is like to be a foreign woman in Japan, and should be an amusing read for anyone else interested in modern Japan.

A Charming, Witty Commentary on Cross-Cultural Communication
This charming and compelling novella was a huge hit in France, winning the prestigious Grand Prix de I'Academie Francaise and selling half a million copies, and while it's certainly good, I have to wonder if it was a slow year or something. Clearly based of Nothomb's own experiences in Japan (the title character is also named Amélie in case there was any doubt), the story covers a year in a Belgian woman's life as she starts and ends a job at a huge Japanese corporation. Because the character was raised in Japan and speaks the language fluently, she's caught between two worlds, she can never be accepted as a Japanese, but she knows to much to be the classic clumsy foreigner.

Which is not to say that she doesn't screw up culturally, because she does-multiple times-but often the underlying problem is not her, but in the system around her. Nothomb uses these little catastrophes as windows to criticize Japanese business and social structures with scathing attacks, most notably a long discourse on the plight of the Japanese woman. Amélie is contrasted with her immediate boss, an immaculately put together beauty who is a lowly middle-manager, but still the highest level female in the company. Amélie has an odd, vaguely erotic, attraction to her which complicates everything. When the entire office witnesses (but tries not to ) this woman's verbally rape and humiliation at the hands of the boss, Amélie finds this emblematic of Japanese society's ostrich-like tendencies. While this may all sound deep and dark, the book is actually quite lively and humorous. That said, it's not a breathtaking book. It's certainly well written and ably translated, and definitely worth reading as commentary on cross-cultural communication (especially by those intending to work in Japan), yet it's hard to understand how it could have become such a phenomenon in France. In any event, I'll certainly be tracking down Nothomb's other works in English.

One footnote: why must publishers insist on branding books "A Novel" when they are so clearly not. If a book is printed in a smaller than standard format, with loads of space between the lines, and comes in at 132 pages, it's a novella, not a novel. Clearly they feel uneasy about asking us for almost [$$] for a book that'll take no more than two hours to read-but please don't insult our intelligence by trying to pass it off as a novel!

Replacing toilet paper rolls in Japan

Although this novel, whose title in French is "Stupeur et Tremblements," is available in an English translation, read it in the original French if you can. It is the funny (and sometimes appalling) account of Amélie-san, a young Belgian woman living in Tokyo who goes to work for Yumimoto, a Japanese corporation. Because she speaks excellent Japanese, she looks forward to an opportunity to use her language skills. Instead, she misunderstands the arcane codes of conduct that govern the relationships between employees and their superiors, and her relationship with the beautiful Fubuki Mori, her boss, deteriorates to the point where Amelie finds herself in charge of her very own "office"---the company toilets. All of the novel takes place inside Yumimoto, on the 44th floor of a skyscraper office building, although Amelie occasionally peers out of a window in the bathroom as if she is encapsulated in some strange underwater vehicle from which she cannot escape. In addition to detailing the bizarre hierarchy that has assigned her to replacing toilet paper rolls, she makes interesting observations on the nature of Japanese employee relationships and on the difficulty of being a female executive in Japan. You'll have to decide for yourself how much truth lies behind the slapstick quality of her wacky encounters with her bosses. The novel is evidently based on the author's own experience as an employee of a Japanese company. It makes a nice counterpoint to those rhapsodic East-meets-West memoirs that over-romanticize Japan.