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About Lost Girls And Love Hotels: A Novel
Product Description Now a feature film starring Alexandra Daddario An achingly honest debut novel of memory, self-destruction, and relationships set in contemporary Tokyo Sometimes, when I’m staring down a room of Japanese stewardesses-in-training, looking across a sea of shiny black coifs, a chorus line of stockinged legs, knees together, toes to the side, when I’m chanting, “Sir, you are endangering yourself and other passengers!” I think I should have let my brother stab me . . . Margaret is doing everything in her power to forget home. And Tokyo’s red light district—teeming with intoxicants, pornography, and seedy love hotels—is almost enough to keep at bay memories of her brother Frank’s descent into schizophrenia. But sobriety brings the past flooding back, along with a pervasive fear that she, too, is destined to battle mental illness. Working as an English specialist at a training academy for Japanese stewardesses by day, and losing herself at night in drugs, alcohol, and S&M fueled sex in the arms of anonymous men, Margaret numbs her loneliness with self destruction, wondering when she’ll take things too far. And when she falls for a married man who is part of Tokyo’s illicit underworld, their relationship might finally force her hand. . . . From Publishers Weekly Margaret, a 20-something Canadian, has fled to Tokyo to escape her past and now instructs aspiring stewardesses in "cabin-crew and airline interview English." By night, she numbs herself with drink and dangerous sex. Her story, as readers learn in alternating chapters, features an imploding family and a dangerously schizophrenic brother. Though Margaret is less than convincing as a narrator, her surreal Tokyo encounters propel the book: a barkeep who communicates with lines from Beatles songs, speakers in public bathrooms that broadcast flushing sounds, a rent-a-dog park, a Western slacker who gigs as a fake wedding minister. And, of course, the automated love hotels that Margaret frequents with a Japanese gangster. The plot lurches forward—Margaret becomes fixated on a missing Western girl, gets fired and hooks up with a man whose name she never learns before her roommate flees. There's redemption to be gained, but the fractured narrative feels like a string of bizarre moments. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review “Edgy, hip… This insider view of high–end Japanese youth culture is wicked and unsparing.” -- Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW “This ambitious first novel may blow a few of the book-and-brunch set out of their orientalist armchairs…” -- Toronto Globe and Mail “Hanrahan presents a Tokyo far from cherry blossoms and Zen temples…an admirable debut, sharp as a samurai’s sword.” -- Calgary Herald “Catherine Hanrahan’s first novel, Lost Girls And Love Hotels, shows huge potential.” -- Now Magazine (Canada) “Lost Girls and Love Hotels could almost be read as an alternative travel guide.” -- Quill & Quire From the Back Cover Margaret is doing everything in her power to forget home. And Tokyo's exotic nightlife -- teeming with intoxicants, pornography, and three-hour love hotels -- enables her to keep her demons at bay. Working as an English specialist at Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute by day, and losing herself in a sex- and drug-addled oblivion by night, Margaret represses memories of her painful childhood and her older brother Frank's descent into madness. But Margaret's deliberate nihilism is thrown off balance as she becomes increasingly haunted by images of a Western girl missing in Tokyo. And when she becomes enamored of Kazu, a mysterious gangster, their affair sparks a chain of events that could spell tragedy for Margaret, in a city where it's all too easy to disappear. About the Author Catherine Hanrahan 's fiction has appeared in Zoetrope All-Story Extra and Open City. Born in Montreal, she has lived in Thailand, England, and Japan, where she worke
