After determining the driver is not injured, she drives away, only to learn later she's considered a criminal for failing to file an accident report. Though she's warned not to drive, she does so anyway and crashes into a yam truck. Marina can't figure out when to throw out the garbage, to the chagrin of her neighbors.

Humor is the beating heart in Malena Watrous' debut novel, 'If You Follow Me.' Based on the author's year of teaching English in Japan, the author's stand-in, 22-year-old Marina, inadvertently breaks nearly every rule. Please don't try 'it wasn't me.' We Japanese seldom eat Gorgonzola cheese!' A reason for this letter is: recently you attempt to throw away battery and jar and some kind of mushroom spaghetti and so forth, all together in one bin. ' Dear Miss Marina how are you? I'm fine thank you. She lives in San Francisco.Ĭonnect with Malena Watrous on Facebook.(Harper Perennial 354 pages $14.99 paperback) She also contributes to and reviews books for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her Pushcart-nominated work has appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Triquarterly, The Massachusetts Review and Kyoto Journal. Malena Watrous is a graduate of Barnard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, She was recently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford where she’s currently a Jones Lecturer in fiction writing.

Part coming-of-age, part fish-out-of-water story, If You Follow Me is seeped in the tension of being the outsider in an intimate community and the joy in finding that human nature is the same everywhere. But as Marina comes to realize, in Japan, you can never really throw away your past. For Marina, Shika is more than just her home as a “temporary person.” It’s also an attempt to escape the reality that has followed her everyday since her father committed suicide. This is like holding hands across a sea!”Īnd so begins If You Follow Me and our narrator Marina’s lessons in “gomi” (garbage) law, Japanese culture, and the workings of Shika, the small, rural Japanese town in which she is teaching English for one year. “Dear Miss Marina… First learn gomi law, second Japanese language, and third you can enjoy international friendship.

Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Prep and American Wife It’s fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.”

If you follow me by malena watrous