This book was really strange. As I was reading it, I wasn’t sure why I continued to read it because there were parts of the story I couldn’t even follow. Near the end, there was a chapter that seemed to have nothing to do with this story. Yet I felt compelled to read it through to the end. Looking back, I found some lines that were funny. I also found references to things Japanese which I liked. The premise of the story was unusual in that it was about a writer who became famous for a novel he did not write. So, the book had some lighter and good moments, but it didn’t exactly move me.

I know that this author has a good reputation for his works. I would like to try some of his other books to see what they’re like. ( )

> Je suis un écrivain japonais by Dany Laferrière
Se reporter au compte rendu de Florence RAMOND JURNEY
In: The French Review, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Oct., 2009), pp. 197-198

An odd, odd book, though I devoured it in a a day. Questions of identity run through the whole novel. The narrator titles his new, to-be-written book, I Am a Japanese Writer. He doesn't live in Japan, and he is not of Japanese descent, though he is fascinated both by Basho and by a beautiful Japanese singer whose identity is equally in flux. But he calls himself a Japanese writer?

I don't understand all the attention paid to a writer's origins. Because, for me, Mishima was my neighbor. Very naturally, I repatriated the writers I read at the time. All of them: Flaubert, Goethe, Whitman, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Kipling, Senghor, Cesaire, Roumain, Amado, Diderot -- they all lived in my village. Otherwise, what were they doing in my room? Years later, when I became a writer and people asked me, "Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer?" I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader's nationality. Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer.

Of course, it's not that simple -- once an identity is out in the world, other people have a stake in affirming or refusing it.

Laferriere also toys with the line between novel and autobiography in his choice of a narrator who shares his profession, his birth country and his current city, and seduces the reader into wondering whether parts of the story are grounded in truth or if it was made up whole cloth, adding another layer to the question of identity.

Unfortunately, the novel seems to unravel toward the end. The narrator reveals that the story so far is a made-up dream of the novel. It never happened to the narrator, he's making it up and inventing the other characters (which we expect of an author, but not of a narrator). As a result, there's no real resolution to the novel, the plot itself is something that never happened. In a way, I was reminded of [b:A Novel Bookstore|7998632|A Novel Bookstore|Laurence Cossé|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1287698580s/7998632.jpg|12511438], another terrific read about books and authors and also translated from French, which also falls into a dreamy vagueness at the end, and I almost wonder if there's something cultural going on here in regards to what constitutes a satisfactory ending (although one novel is French and the other French-Canadian in origin). ( )

It's possible that Laferrière is correct, as this slight and far too clever novel about a struggling writer from Montreal who passes as a best selling author in Japan would probably make more sense in that language than it did in its English translation. ( )