Ebook: Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries

Everyone wants to escape their boring, stagnant lives full of inertia and regret. But so few people actually have the bravery to run -- run away from everything and selflessly seek out personal fulfillment on the other side of the world where they don't understand anything and won't be expected to. The world is full of cowards. Tim Anderson was pushing thirty and working a string of dead-end jobs when he made the spontaneous decision to pack his bags and move to Japan, where my status as a U.S. passport holder and card-carrying American English speaker was an asset rather than a liability. It was a gutsy move, especially for a tall, white, gay Southerner who didnt speak a lick of Japanese. But his life desperately needed a shot of adrenaline, and what better way to get one than to leave behind everything he had ever known to move to a tiny, overcrowded island heaving with clever, sensibly proportioned people that make him look fat? In Tokyo, Tim became a gaijin, an outsider whose stumbling progression through Japanese culture is minutely chronicled in these sixteen howlingly funny stories. Yet despite the steep learning curve and the seemingly constant humiliation, the gaijin from North Carolina gradually begins to find his way. Whether playing drums on the fly in an otherwise all-Japanese noise band or attempting to keep his English classroom clean when its invaded by an older female student with a dirty mind, Tim comes to realize that living a meaningful life is about expecting the unexpectedright when he least expects it.

**

From Publishers Weekly

When Anderson decides his life in North Carolina is in a rut, he chooses to make a dramatic change and moves to Japan to teach English, as he chronicles in this hilarious, enlightening, and insightful memoir. Anderson is tall, white, and extremely gayall things that distinguish him from the average person in Japan. His various adventuresaccidentally stumbling into the adult area of Tokyo and learning that Japanese porn cuts out all the good parts; discovering the hard way the low standards some English academies have for their teachers; experiencing the joys of karaoke and experimental musichelp Anderson begin to understand the differences between American and Japanese culture. A gifted writer, Anderson is sensitive to cultural differences, delightful in his irreverence, and astutely aware of himself and his particular perspective. His observations are often laugh-out-loud funny and will leave readers with the desire to travel and to keep turning the pages, wondering, by the end, where Anderson will travel to next.
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From Booklist

Aside from such classroom encounters and problems of his own with the Japanese language that vaguely recall David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Anderson regales his readers with tales of Japanese popular culture and his own social life Booklist