"SWEET DARUMA" "a Japan satire" Magda is thrilled to leave her globalization-protesting boyfriend in Toronto and head to Tokyo to teach English conversation...or so she thinks. Upon her arrival she is whisked off to save the life of a suicidal salaryman with the help of a strategic idiom. Magda has unwittingly joined the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency English Response Team, and she better brush up her vocabulary in a hurry, because the English emergencies keep coming. Suddenly caught up in the politics of English and pop culture in Japan, Magda soon realizes to expect the unexpected. She's now the student--and Japan definitely has a lot to teach. "From Orgasm Kabuki to troll girls in the pee trade, stackable Daruma apartments to a mute monkey named Kagemusha, Janice Valerie Young has written an irreverent send-up of the warped world of English conversation schools (and the zany international staff that fuel them) that is as imaginative and over-the-top as Tokyo itself. Strike up the chindonya, this girl can write!" --Leza Lowitz, author of "Green Tea to Go" "Janice Valerie Young's absurdist satire of the turn-of-the-millennium Japanese pop culture and post-bubble society trots out an outrageous cast of characters, from Yakuza wannabes to Yamamba urine sellers and a particularly disgusting pet monkey...a melange not seen since Thomas Pynchon's 'whole sick crew'." --Hillel Wright, author of "Rotary Sushi " ****** Review of "Bankrupt," from "Faces in the Crowds: a Tokyo International Anthology": ""Bankrupt, " a short story by Janice Valerie Young that contains no references to Japan or "Japan" is a screamed, jazzy, nerve-jangling two-page riff on a broken marriage triggered when the husband complains that a hair of his wife, who feels herself to be the wronged party, has fallen into his spaghetti." --Mark Austin, "The Daily Yomiuri" Cover illustration by Wayne Wilson