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Publisher Description
1989. Severin Boxx is the seventeen-year-old son of an Air Force pilot who lives on a military base in Japan. He loves -- from afar -- Virginia Kindwall, the daughter of the general who runs the base. Virginia is tough and sophisticated beyond her years, and when she falls in with the Japanese underground her dealings result in her disappearance and Severin is forced to return to America.
2006. Unhappily married and living in San Francisco, Severin's life is turned upside-down by the arrival of a postcard from General Kindwall, now dying in a hospital in Vietnam, asking him to find his daughter before he dies. But the search for Virginia will take him back to the country of his youth, and to unexpected consequences for both.
Suffused with the same intensity of emotion and facility with language as Jarhead, Anthony Swofford's debut novel marks the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Swofford explores teenage love in his uneven first novel, which opens in 1989 at Yokata Air Base outside Tokyo (the title comes from the name of a nearby train stop). Severin Boxx, a 17-year-old military brat, plays football and pines for Virginia Sachiko Kindwall, the half-Japanese daughter of the American base commander, who's also his coach. Virginia's involvement in some not-so-petty crime (her heroine is Faye Dunaway of Bonnie and Clyde) leads her into serious trouble, which separates the young lovers seemingly forever. Swofford, as one might expect from the author of the acclaimed Jarhead (2003), his memoir of being a Marine sniper in the first Gulf War, clearly knows the U.S. military culture, though some readers may find his view of it overly harsh. He also does a good job of depicting the strange m lange where Japanese and American cultures coexist, but he's less convincing in his portrayal of Boxx's adult life (and doomed marriage) in San Francisco, while the ending is much too neat to be truly compelling. 7-city author tour.