Lost Girls & Love Hotels

Lost Girls & Love Hotels

by Catherine Hanrahan

Simon & Schuster, HK$198

The cliches are all there at the start of Lost Girls & Love Hotels: vending machines selling used schoolgirl panties, sushi eaten off the bodies of naked women, death by overwork. But Catherine Hanrahan subverts the formulaic image of Japan by admitting, through her protagonist Margaret, that these are things she has never seen. That said, the Tokyo this English teacher experiences is nothing if not familiar: as the sole westerner at a school for flight attendants, she performs the role of a linguistic monkey, helping hopeful stewardesses pronounce words that come with the job - 'beverage', for instance, instead of 'drink'. At night Margaret does away with decorum by drinking and snorting her way to numbness, which helps her forget why she's so far from home and blot out the emptiness of casual sex. While her synapses are firing, however, she obsesses about a missing bar hostess, posters of whom are a constant reminder that taking random men home, or to love hotels, is a dangerous habit. She ponders her chances of abuse even as she beds a tattooed yakuza type. Alternating between Tokyo and Toronto, where Margaret experienced a childhood she would rather erase, Hanrahan's pacy novel is seductive and insightful. Best of all, little is lost in translation.