Tokyo is my Garden

Written by Benoît Peeters and Frédéric Boilet
Art by Frédéric Boilet with Jirô Taniguchi

This French graphic novel, set in Japan, was very enjoyable.  It is a very unassuming, thin book, which follows a Frenchman sent to Tokyo by a cognac company, Heurault Cognac, to open up the Japanese market.  Our hero, David Martin, has not put much effort into this job, preferring to learn the different kanji (the ideogrammatic symbols that make up written Japanese), work part time in the fish market, and look for the right Japanese girl.

When the book opens, David's girlfriend has cut him loose, and his boss is coming to visit.  He quickly meets and falls for a new girl, but the prospect of his boss pulling the plug on his work visa casts a pall over the beginning of their relationship.  When M. Heurault arrives, David has to try to work out some kind of plan to stay in Japan.

While this book is light on plot, it is full of nice little character moments, and it provides an interesting look at the expatriate experience in Japan.  The book is an interesting contrast to something like Tonoharu, which is a cartoonist's memoir of teaching English in Japan by Lars Martinson.  Martinson feels very awkward in the country, while in this book, David flourishes and thrives in Tokyo (hence the title).

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, although I must say that it didn't live up the effusive and almost embarrassing praise heaped on it in its introduction.