The Men in My Country

From Booklist
Abildskov's debut memoir follows the travails of a thirtysomething ex-pat in a medium-size city in the Japanese mountains. At 31, Abildskov has no career plans, and is still smarting from a failed stateside relationship. To complicate things in her new environs, she becomes involved with three very different men. Amir is a handsome laborer who works in a noodle shop and sends money home to Iran. Despite his sweetness, he's too young, and he has the distressing habit of wearing bright, primary colors--something that, in Japan, only children do. "The professor," a married historian, is too old and easy to dismiss with his polyester suits and shoes bearing little chains. But Nozaki, a businessman, is just right, until he begins to withdraw from Abildskov's interest. What follows is an astonishing and brutally honest portrait of Abildskov's pursuit of Nozaki. After their brief affair ends, and her passions cool, the author returns to graduate school in the U.S., solitary but ready for the future. Of interest to travelers and those who have humiliated themselves at the altar of love. Rebecca Maksel
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Natalia Rachel Singer, author of Scraping By in the Big Eighties
"I was enthralled and transported from start to finish."

Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge, Leap, and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
"When T. S. Eliot speaks of transient beauty born out of sorrow, he was foreshadowing the writing of Marilyn Abildskov."

Book Description
In the early 1990s, at the watershed age of thirty, Marilyn Abildskov decided she needed to start over. She accepted an offer to move from Utah to Matsumoto, Japan, to teach English to junior high school students. "All I knew is that I had to get away and when I stared at my name on the Japanese contract, the squiggles of katakana, my name typed in English sturdily beneath, I liked how it looked. As if it—as if I—were translated, transformed, emerging now as someone new." The Men in My Country is the story of an American woman living and loving in Japan. Satisfied at first to observe her exotic surroundings, the woman falls in love with the place, with the light, with the curve of a river, with the smell of bonfires during obon, with blue and white porcelain dishes, with pencil boxes, and with small origami birds. Later, struggling for a deeper connection—"I wanted the country under my skin"— Abildskov meets the three men who will be part of her transformation and the one man with whom she will fall deeply in love. A travel memoir offering an artful depiction of a very real place, The Men in My Country also covers the terrain of a complex emotional journey, tracing a geography of the heart, showing how we move to be moved, how in losing ourselves in a foreign place we can become dangerously—and gloriously—undone.

About the Author
Marilyn Abildskov’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in such magazines as Black Warrior Review, Fourth Genre, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Quarterly West. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa, lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga.


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Finely wrought though often self-conscious memoir of the author's fulfilling sojourn in Japan, where she met three men who completed her sense of belonging. Needing a change at 30, Abildskov left her native Utah in the early 1990s for an assignment to teach English at three junior high schools in Matsumoto. It proved to be much more than a career move. She found herself entranced by everything Japanese: the blue-and-white dishes she used, the holidays devoted to looking, even the pencil boxes-"I loved living in a place where people carried writing supplies in small, tidy bundles made of straw or plastic or metal or wood." But, she writes, "I wanted to go deeper, I wanted to go inside the country's mind, I wanted the country under my skin." To complete her love affair with Japan, apparently, she needed to fall in love with the men who lived there. As Abildskov records her experiences teaching English to businessmen as well as teenagers, she also describes three men she met who enabled her finally to understand Japan more completely. First up was the professor, who spoke excellent English, and he and Abildskov felt a mutual attraction, but she backed off when she realized he was married, though they continued to meet in coffee shops. The second, a young Iranian named Amir, took care of her at a vulnerable time; the third, Nozaki, was the one she fell in love with. Nozaki stood out among the businessmen who attended her classes: he was more of a loner, read widely, and was interested in ideas (the others wanted to talk only about sex and golf). He was also single, and the two began an intense affair. Abildskov was tempted to stay on, but Nozaki, a complex man, was not easily pinned down. Oneof those travel stories that reveals a heart as smitten with the place as the people. Agent: Neeti Madan/Sterling Lord Literistic


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