Lost Girls and Love Hotels

Lori A. Dunn is an ESL teacher and an event coordinator, with a
background in linguistics and education in Okanagan, B.C.

In Lost Girls and Love Hotels, we follow our self-destructive heroine,
Margaret, on her quest to forget her family and past through days of
meaningless work and tortured nights of chemicals and one-night stands
in Tokyo. She almost succeeds but for the intriguing gangster Kazu and
haunting images of a lost foreign girl dotting the city. Her friends,
Ines and Adam, barely hold their own lives together, fashioning their
existences out of the vagaries and loopholes of the possible roles for
foreigners in homogenous, and often xenophobic, Japan.

The “lost girls” of the title clearly refers to all of the
expatriate women in Japan, not only to the one whose face appears on
posters around Tokyo. And the love hotels are the ubiquitous,
thematically decorated rooms that rent out for either a three-hour
“stay” or an all-night “rest” throughout the city. This is truly
a story about the West’s understanding of the complexities of
Japan’s society, the inner workings always below the surface. Margaret
and her friends navigate their corners of Japan with deceptive ease,
ultimately all falling afoul of the unwritten rules of Japan’s society
in their own ways.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels is a book that is hard to put down.