The Eight Corners of the World - Softcover

Weaver, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 093003127X ISBN 13: 9780930031275

Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co, 1990

Synopsis

A novelist's comic account of a Japanese student who becomes a spy, filmmaker, and movie mogul charts the big-time aspirations of Yoshinori Yamaguchi

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Yoshinori Yamaguchi, the fast-talking hero of this episodic novel by the author of Count a Lonely Cadence , speaks in four tongueshis native Japanese, proper English, hipster slang and pidgin Yiddishand has at least as many identities. As teenaged Yosh, his love of all things American wins him a job as interpreter for a baseball team visiting Japan. As "Gooch," he travels to America to become an exchange student at Oklahoma A & M until the outbreak of World War II. As the code-named Lt. Benshi, he spends the war making pro-Japanese propaganda movies with such titles as Down with the Stars & Stripes. And as Foto Joe Yamaguch, he makes his fortune as a film producer in postwar Japan. But despite its lively and often adventurous plot, Yamaguchi's tale is tedious, burdened with a ludicrous narrative voice, a repetitive melange of jokes, malapropisms, jive-talk and odd constructions that are often all but impenetrable: "Thus it were I did build hustle nut, reet?" By creating a character whose ever-peppy lingo is frequently at odds with his emotions and feelings, Weaver achieves a few strikingly dissonant passages, but more often, the effect is merely alienating.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

"Can you dig it, Jack?" Weaver's fourth novel is the story of Yoshinori Yamaguchi, recalled for the purpose of guiding a tattooist at work on Yamaguchi's ample back. Unwitting accomplice in baseball star Moe Berg's 1934 spy mission to Tokyo (here bumped to 1935), "Gooch" finds himself recruited in turn to investigate "boonies hick sticks of U.S. of A.": Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College. After the dense verbal comedy of these first two sections, Yamaguchi's war and postwar years read a little flatas if Weaver felt obligated to write a survey of Japanese-American relations. But for half its length, this is great fun, "as in hee hee, not to fail to mention hardy har!" Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 093003127X
• ISBN 13: 9780930031275
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 382