Suzanne Kamata is also a permanent resident of Japan and lives in Tokushima City in Tokushima Prefecture which is located on the island of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four major islands. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and came to Tokushima to teach English when she was twenty-two. Little did she know it would become her permanent home.

Owls in the Ginza and as its subtitle suggests are about Kamata’s experience of living in Japan. She is married to a Japanese man and has two children and gave birth to twins, a son and a daughter named Jio and Lilia. The children were born prematurely and her daughter was also deaf and had cerebral palsy.

The book is a collection of Kamata’s essays that have been previously published in a number of other periodicals and books such as Borderless Journal, Eye-Ai, and Traveller’s Tales 2017 just to name a few.

There are a total of twenty-four essays which also include full color pictures and on a few of the essays, Kamata’s own illustrations are added. Although most of her adventures take place around Tokushima and Shikoku, she also writes about traveling to other areas in Japan and about a couple of experiences she has abroad.

She goes to Akita in the Tohoku region of Japan where her son plans to go to university. She travels with her disabled daughter and visits an owl cafe in Tokyo. She also takes a trip with her daughter and friend to Naoshima, an island known for its large number of museums.

Kamata had learned about a place called Okushima from one of her friend’s Facebook posts. It is also known as “Rabbit Island” and the place is famous for its cute and furry residents of which there are a large number, although the total number is unknown. The island also has a dark history as it is home to the Poison Gas Museum.

Kamata and her daughter also go to Hawaii where they take an open-door helicopter ride for a “once-in-a life-time” mother-daughter experience. Another trip they take is to New York City where they made reservations to stay at the Algonquin Hotel in Times Square.

Her daughter’s first question after they checked in was, “Do they have wi-fi here?”. Kamata, as a published author, had a more profound reaction. As she “glanced around at the dark wooded tables of the Round Table Restaurant”, she was “eager to channel past visitors through less modern means”.

“Perhaps the ghost of one-time resident legendary actor John Barrymore” or the spirit of “rapier-witted Dorothy Parker”. Maybe she will get a chance to see “Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber, who penned Showboat and Giant” here.

Kamata’s essays are filled with wit and humor whether the stories about fun activities she has taken part in such as going on a “Myster Dinner” tour or weeding with locals at neighborhood shrine or dealing with the tragedy of losing a family member and having to make a sudden trip to South Carolina in the United States.

I really enjoy reading about people’s experience of visiting or living in Japan as I am also an ex-pat who has lived in this country for more than thirty years. Going on vacation to a foreign country is a lot different than actually living for years in a different country. Japan may be a small country compared to the United States but reading essays from other ex-pats about our adopted country only shows that there is so much more to see, visit, do and explore.