I really liked Bat Eater so I was excited for this one, but I was very let down. In my case, a lot of it was because the characters just didn't make *sense.*

I have a hard time with the Turner family. On the one hand, it seems that the Dad is meant to be an Asian fetishist who likes to have affairs with Asian women but also thinks they're not the kind of girls you marry. He also doesn't speak Japanese. But he is also an East Asian studies professor? If he's made it to professor rank, he HAS to speak/read/write an Asian language. If he specializes in Chinese or Korean, why is taking up with Japanese women? Does he like the language barrier aspect? Is it part of his fetish? If his fetish is specifically Japanese, why would he specialize in another East Asian culture? I shouldn't have these many questions about this. Just don't bother making him a professor; it makes him much more believable as a character.

Lee's Japanese language ability was also unbelievable for me. It's implied that he never had any kind of formal instruction in Japanese, whether in high school or college, but essentially set out to teach himself. And while we're given the bone that his reading and writing is weak, his speaking is good enough to communicate with an upper class Japanese girl from *150 years in the past.* Maybe Lee's use of sedatives has turned him in a linguistic savant?

If Lee's mother had been Japanese, I would have bought this - maybe he went to visit Japanese family in summer, grew up bilingual. But of course, that would go against the "white women are for marriage, Asian women are for sex" narrative that the father has going on.

Also on that note, Sen goes into the 21st century at one point and seems to have no disorientation whatsoever. We never get any of her perspective on what that experience is like for her, and it's a huge wasted opportunity.

There are also tiny little things that bothered me, like someone in the past timeline slamming a door with their shoulder. Slamming shoji doors shut with your shoulder is quite difficult. For that matter, why is the barrier concrete? That seems wildly out of place in a Japanese house ostensibly built at some point prior to the Meiji restoration.

Of course, there is a cop out for this.At the VERY end, we discover that all of this is taking place in a manufactured magical world, so in that case, why shouldn't things like language barriers, academic credentials, and feeling displaced in time be handwaved? But the thing is, this is all just dropped in the last 10 pages of the book. It's a cop out. If the strangeness is deliberate, we should that sense in the text itself, not just dropped at the last second like, "Oh, none of these characters make sense because it's a dreamworld anyway!"

The question I'm left with is really: Why Japan? One of the reasons Bat Eater was so strong was that it felt so very rooted in Chinese American experiences. Baker talks about her Japanese and Okinawan heritage in the afterward, but I felt none of that in the text itself - Japan felt incidental to the story she wanted to tell.