My Mother Is a Tractor: A Life in Rural Japan

I'm really in two minds about this book. On the one hand it's a raw and no holds barred look at the life of an Australian JET ALT with all the hilarity and emotional highs and lows of living in Japan. On the other hand it's a poorly written and seemingly mean spirited criticism of the Japanese people and their country.

The author himself has stated that he has written many of the stories in a tongue in cheek manner and that readers need to keep that in mind. While that is true, the humor fails to be funny in almost all cases and does not work in the written form. Instead of laughing with the author, we as readers are usually left feeling as though he bears grudges against the Japanese people simply because they fail to act in a way that he expects them to.

On top of that the stories are often disjointed and loosely structured so that it is hard to follow along before coming to an abrupt end.

I appreciate the fact that he has taken to time and effort to share his life and thoughts on Japan and I realize that he may well be a wonderful teacher and have loved his time in Japan. But at the same time, the absence of any teaching anecdotes and only brief mentions of his fondness for his students will leave readers with the sense that he merely spent two years traveling around Japan to party and get drunk.

I certainly hope that if he writes about his life in China he will take any criticism of his work to heart and present us with a wonderfully crafted tale of what living and teaching in Asia entails. Both the good and the bad.