Bicycle days : a novel /

Fresh out of Yale, Alec Stern spends a summer working in an American computer company's Tokyo offices. Schwartz, a 23-year-old Harvard grad, vividly sets the scene of his promising if overly self-absorbed debut novel. Alec's romance with a 33-year-old Japanese woman, Kawashima, is the highlight of his stay. Through flashbacks to his boyhood in New York City, we learn that he came to the Orient partly to wipe the slate clean, to escape memories of his parents' divorce and his bitter fights with his older brother Mark. But Mark's unexpected appearance in Tokyo, combined with the death of Kawashima's aged grandfather, jolt Alec out of his Shangri-La. Schwartz has a good ear for the humorous misunderstandings and cultural differences that often arise in Japanese-American interactions. Unfolding in 40 vignettes sketched in a lean, almost mimimalist style, the diary-like narrative evokes a medley of sights and experiences with which Western readers can readily identify--a view of Mount Fuji, pachinko (pinball) parlors, the tea ceremony, coping with subways, Japanese family customs, shopping in department stores and fish markets. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A slice-of-life first novel about a confused young American in Japan. Alec Stern, just graduated from Yale, has arrived in Tokyo to work for an American computer company and to live with a Japanese family. Scenes of life in Japan alternate with flashbacks to Alec's childhood. Alec has enough Japanese to communicate with the Hasegawas, his well-to-do ""homestay"" family, which means for the reader a series of stilted conversations. We also see Alec at the office, working long hours on a report for his American boss; Alec at the barbershop and the department store; Alec suffering through a live sex-show; Alec taking a break, staying with an elderly couple in a remote country village. He has two brief flings during his three months in Tokyo, the first with an upscale club hostess that he ends abruptly after a week, the second with Kiyoko, an attractive, intelligent co-worker who at 33 feels she is too old to find a husband, and soon realizes Alec is much too confused to be any kind of substitute. For Alec cannot decide whether he enjoys his new-found freedom; when his older brother Mark shows up and suggests they share an apartment, Alec brushes him off, yet once he has finished his report (which his boss calls ""terrific""), he decides to quit, to return stateside ""to be with my family."" The root of the problem seems to be not so much his parents' messy divorce, eight years before, as Alec's Oedipal feeling for his mother, still the most important woman in his life (the title refers to her teaching him to ride in Central Park). The untransmuted material relating to Alec's family throws what might have been a coming-of-age novel out of kilter (for plainly Alec has not come of age): a disappointing jumble, then, though the author writes impressively of traditional Japanese life as lived in the country (he doesn't get a handle on Tokyo). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.