Forty Day Fiancé by Erin McCarthy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


McCarthy does it again. With sassy wit and irresistible charm, she gives readers what they want. Forty Day Fiance' is a laugh out loud, can't help but fall in love, kind of read. Felicia is one step away from finding her happy ending with the man of her dreams. Except he doesn't know it yet. What began as a curiosity becomes a disaster in the making. McCarthy proves she knows her readers by heart and continues to give them a reason to smile. 

Although described as horror this rather odd little book is more a gentle stroll through the demented mind of one overweight American Frank, and his somewhat shady confidante Kenji. Together they frequent the late-night Tokyo drinking dens, and similar dubious establishments in order to fuel Frank’s increasingly odd behaviour. It is only as the night progresses that Kenji’s suspicion of his unconventional colleague become a reality, that the true intentions of Frank are exposed, and life for Kenji can never be the same again. For those familiar with the style of Haruki Murakami  (Ryu Murakami is no relation) In the Misco Soup will prove to be a delightful read, but others may struggle with the unconventional story telling.

McCarthy brings light to an often times dreary day. Her mysteries are eccentric, her characters are eclectic and her sense of humor is a welcome breath of fresh air. Five First Dates is a perfectly, imperfect temptation that proves itself irresistible on multiple levels. Chase away your blues and open your heart to an addictive kind of fun.

Someone years ago (back when I was still in high school) told me I seem like the type of person who would like this author, and recommended this book to me. It looked interesting so I put it on my to-read list, then I took it off because it didn't look as interesting...then last year I added it again because I kept thinking about it! So I was glad to finally be getting around to this.

This was a philosophical journey into the darker side of modern Japanese society. The reader gets a lot of fascinating introductions to different types of people in the Tokyo sex scene. Descriptions of different women who "sell it" and why, plus the people who facilitate the whole business. Toward the end of the story Frank talks about a Peruvian hooker who knew more about Japan than the Japanese women in an omiai club, who were only interested in fashion and expensive things and who sold themselves because they were lonely. There was also a guy named Satoshi in the beginning who was considered mental because he played with blocks on the train. I liked that guy.

I liked the concept of bonno, the worldly desires or bad instincts. And the parts about shifting between different worlds was cool, too. I got lost as a kid plenty of times (and still get lost easily now) so I know exactly what Frank was talking about when he said it was like entering a different reality.

Thought-provoking quotations:

• "All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason for that might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants." (p. 30) . . . "The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there." (p. 39)
• "Parents, teachers, government—they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally." (p. 62)
• "Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can't really deal with on your own." (p. 72)
• "Basically people who love horror movies are people with boring lives. They want to be stimulated, and they need to reassure themselves, because when a really scary movie is over, you're reassured to see that you're still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That's the real reason we have horror films—they act as shock absorbers—and if they disappeared altogether it would mean losing one of the few ways we have to ease the anxiety of the imagination." (p. 161)