nwasianweekly.com
Jan. 12, 2007

‘Moonlight’ is chick lit that’s not well lit

By Stacy Nguyen
Northwest Asian Weekly

There’s a stigma attached to the worn pink spine of a romance novel sitting on your mother’s bookshelves. Sometimes she segregates it from the rest of the “real” books. Sometimes she goes as far as hiding those paperbacks under the bed because she surely knows there is no literary merit in escapist, guilty-pleasure, anti-feminist fiction.

Chick lit is a genre that seems to have blown up in popularity. With flashy covers and romantic comedy sentimentality to the storytelling, chick lit differentiates itself from romance novels because it’s catered to our generation. Gone are those fantasies involving castles and fair wenches—replacing those are stories with an urban chic feminine sensibility. “Midori by Moonlight,” by Wendy Tokunaga, does the genre one better and also ambitiously deals with the culture clashes and generation gaps of Asian American culture.

The heroine of “Midori by M
oonlight” is Midori Saito, who is an atypical young Japanese woman. She’s only interested in dating “gaijin” men—non-Japanese outsiders. She follows her fiancé, a white man named Kevin, all the way to America. Her fiancé ends up leaving her for his blonde bombshell ex because there’s apparently unfinished business there. Midori, stranded in San Francisco without a green card, races to become legalized before the American government gets wind of the lack of marriage. Armed with a trusty Japanese-born male roommate with a heart of gold, Midori struggles to stay financially afloat and legally under the radar with aplomb. She does this by working under-the-table as a hostess at a karaoke bar that mostly caters to sleazy, middle-aged Japanese businessmen night after night — as well as selling some of her homemade pastries.

She is met with many trials and tribulations, but what is characteristic of Midori is that she never compromises her goodness and her integrity. She is earnest and innocent, and that aspect of her character is optimistically maintained throughout the novel. Despite all the unfortunate obstacles that creep up in her life, on her days off, she can still dream of following her great passion of becoming a pastry chef alongside her dream of finding her Mr. Right.

“Midori by Moonlight” has the tough task of juggling two intents at once, sometimes to its detriment. While one goal of the novel is to entertain in a light, happy and funny romantic comedy way, the other goal is to explore the cultural differences and juxtapose America against Japan. Its downfall is, whether it’s intentional on Tokunaga’s part or not, the American culture all too often wins out over the Japanese one. There is a fair bit of over-explanation and oversimplication of “Asian” traits, whereas American traits don’t need any explanations because it’s the default — it’s what’s normal. There is also a fair bit of Orientalization in the novel, wherein positive traits, such as confidence, individuality and open-mindedness, are aligned with America; and negative traits, such as conformity, sexism and narrow-mindedness, are aligned with Asia. Similarly, there is also a certain amount of ageism, too.

Midori’s father, for instance, is portrayed as an old-fashioned Japanese man who psychologically mistreats his wife and acts as if she is his servant. In the novel, this outlook is pretty much defined as just something that the Japanese has a tendency to do — oppress women. Midori, our protagonist, who is completely at odds with her parents’ culture because of her Americanized traits, often expresses displeasure with all Japanese men, preferring to date only foreigners because there is the implication that all Japanese men are like her father. Also, when she is in San Francisco, working as a hostess, the Japanese businessmen depicted are mostly greasy adulterers on vacation.

In the end, whether “Midori by Moonlight” is worth reading or not is dependent on what kind of mind-set we decide to approach it with. If we want escapist fiction and a guaranteed happy ending for our heroine, there might not be any problems here. However, if we choose to come at the novel with an attention to fairer cultural depictions, it’d be better to look elsewhere.

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