Product Description

Amelie, a well-intentioned and eager young westerner, goes to Japan to spend a year working at the Yumimoto Corporation. Returning to the land where she was born is the fulfilment of a dream for Amelie, but working there turns into a comic nightmare of terror and self-abasement. Disturbing, hilarious and totally convincing Fear and Trembling displays an elegant and shrewd understanding of the intricate ways Japanese relationships are made and spoiled.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29496 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 132 pages

Review
"'Ingenious... With great delicacy, Nothomb updates the age-old divide between East and West in this delectable little book.' O, The Oprah Magazine; 'Nothomb is the latest enfant terrible of French letters... She has an acidic yet passionately romantic view of human nature.' Elle"

Customer Reviews

An excellent overview of the culture clash.
I don't know if Amelie Nothomb has ever worked for a Japanese Corporation, and nor do I know how much of this book is drawn from life. What I do know is that this story reads like a genuinely honest and moving description of someone hopelessly out of their depth in an alien society and culture they can't understand.
When young European Amelie goes to work for the Yumimoto corporation in Japan she is systematically bullied, belittled, and humiliated by superiors whose motivations seem arbitary at first, but over time she come to realise how much they are motivated by fear and cultural imperatives with which she has no point of reference.
Tracing her decline in respect and position in the organisation from lowly clerk to calendar turner to lavatory attendant, all the while knowing that nobody ever quits or is fired from a Japanese corporation. Her descent into mental anguish and even moments of madness are intricately described, as is her determination not to be beated by the sheer inhumanity of the corporate culture she encounters.
An excellent book which I heartily recommend.

Disturbing
I have never been to Japan and have no idea whether Amélie Nothomb’s picture of Japanese corporate society is correct - but if it is, it is a horrifying one: sadistically hierarchical, where no one can expect any pleasure, can hope only to avoid shame, and where the expectation for women in particular is a life of such artificiality and submission that their only escape could be into a pleasure-less and loveless marriage with some man who is nearly as stunted as she is. A western woman, hoping to work in such an environment for which nothing has prepared her, is likely to be driven mad, to lose all confidence in herself and eventually even to see in her own degradation some kind of liberation: she can hardly fall any lower. She should have been sacked for incompetence, but it is almost impossible for a corporation to sack an employee. As for her, however humiliated she is, she won’t quit herself before her contract was up because she, too, has assumed that quitting is a matter of shame rather than of an assertion of her dignity. (True, she also admits that she already had a martyr-complex.) That, at any rate, is what happens to the Belgian-educated Amélie in this story. The blurbs on the back describe the book as ‘funny’ and ‘hilarious’: I find it hard to enjoy the humour. It is one thing to find Japanese culture alien to that of the west, another to subject it to an attack so savage and unremitting that I think it comes close to racism. Lest we think that Nothomb is merely describing the situation in one particular company from which we should not draw general conclusions about the country as a whole, she drives her point home by saying that Japan was simply ‘an extension of The Company’. That the book has achieved international best-seller status must dismay even those Japanese (and I know some) who are critical of their conformist society.

I have given this book a four star rating for its literary quality. Were the rating to reflect how it made me feel - that is, uneasy and indeed repelled - it would be considerably lower.

Hilariously irritating
I just loved it! It is very short and easy to read, quick!
Nothomb does not waste time describing the obvious (the reader is definitely not taken by the hand to the point that the imagination is not even required).
I was wondering who really was the victim, or victims, or the torturer(s). It ends abruptely and you almost wonder if you are missing some pages.
I loved to hate its plot and characters. A simple book that really entertained me for my daily train route (from gigling to wanting to punch people). I have already ordered more of Nothomb books... and I cant wait! I was entertained and surprised, the perfect match for fiction book reading.