Cathy Floe

Mama-san Cathy Floe

A young Canadian woman is hostessing at an elite club in Tokyo, where the battle-ax Mama-san forces her to dress as Anne of Green Gables and wear a resplendent red wig. One evening, she is abducted by the Japanese mafia, and forced to give English lessons to the paranoid Yakuza leader, who loathes fake hair. Then she encounters a lonely closet-writing cop and a priest with a tendency to expose himself to foreign women, and she learns that these two men belong to a secret society of story-tellers. A tale the priest shares, about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, provides the seeds of truth that allow 'Anne' to uncover a mammoth web of criminal activity that spans generations. Her crime-solving, while assisted by the Japanese spiritual world, is confounded by a bombardment of bizarre challenges, including an increasingly complicated relationship with ailing Mama-san. While navigating the strangeness of being a foreigner in Japan, our heroine is usually wearing the ridiculous 'Anne suit', and she is periodically accosted by paparazzi-style gangs of teenaged girls who are devoted members of the Anne of Green Gables Fan Club, and desperate for signatures for their Hello Kitty autograph books. Set in the gaigin houses, foreign hostess bars, ' love hotel' theme rooms, and Yakuza lairs of Tokyo in the 1980's, when foreigners from everywhere are cashing in on the bubble economy, Mama-san is a comedic romp, essentially about foreigners in Japan being misunderstood, and foreigners pretending to be something they are not, (hence the Australian surf-dudes posing as diplomats at the Canadian Embassy.) Anybody that has had the peculiar experience of being a foreigner living in Japan will relate to the characters and situations in this novel.