In Appropriate

Gary Schmidt, a small-town American boy, meets a Japanese girl in college and follows her to Japan to start a family. Little does he know that her conservative Japanese clan has hidden agendas and secret intentions. Gary eventually realizes that he must escape their clutches – and convince his family to do the same before it’s too late!


IN APPROPRIATE is a book about child abductions in Japan, where after a divorce, a non-Japanese man comes back to Japan to retrieve his children back to America. Although a work of fiction, it is an amalgam of several true stories of divorce and Left-Behind Parents in Japan. 


The author adds: "'In Appropriate' is about more than just divorce: I wanted to describe how a person would find fascination in Japan and Japanese people, come over during Japan's Bubble Era to see Japan ripe with opportunity, and find how Japan went sour as an economy over the past two decades. It was wonderful to recount as a Bubble-Era veteran -- when in the late 1980's Japan looked poised to take over the world, and even challenge notions of how capitalism works -- and see how, step-by-step, Japanese society would be squeezed and squeezed, convinced that recovery was right around the corner just like Godot. How a person could assimilate himself to the point of founding his own company, becoming bilingual in Japanese, even taking Japanese citizenship, yet be blindsided by events that were nearly always beyond his control. 'In Appropriate' is also a time capsule charting Japan's descent into mediocrity and comparative international irrelevance."