Realia

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

Will Aitken begins his grotesquely comic, melodramatic farce with a
retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. From this high
ground he cuts immediately to the broad farce of a Western tourist newly
arrived in a Japanese hotel and in search of ice. Shortly, this
androgynous first-person narrator is undergoing the discomfort of the
seated posture required for the tea ceremony, while her/his thoughts run
over the adjacent temple garden with a pond “the size of a bathmat”
and “nothing so vulgar as flowers.”

Japanese customs have rarely been seen through such a lens. Being
scrubbed by friends in a public bath makes one feel “like a car in one
of those drive-through places: slip your engine into idle and let her
roll.”

Japanophiles may find Realia too gross for words, quite unbearable.
Readers with a taste for farce and a high tolerance for vulgarity will
enjoy this unusual novel. Those who have traveled in Japan and found
some of its ways just a little precious may laugh out loud, quite
frequently.

The Indiana-born author attended McGill University in 1972 and stayed
on to cofound the city’s first gay-and-lesbian bookstore, Libraire
L’Androgyne, in 1974. He has worked as a writer and broadcaster for
the CBC and the BBC, and as a journalist for The Globe and Mail and the
National Post. Realia is his third novel.