Alien Rice

A Novel of Mixed Marriage

In this perceptive novel of interracial marriage, the author of Japan Unmasked again exposes the harsh realities and strange contradictions of life in post-WWII Japan.

Alice Burns, the canny and compassionate daughter of Glasgow workingman, knew almost nothing about her employer's homeland when she started to work in London office of the Tozai company, a great international trading firm. But when she married Saburo Tanaka, a member of Tozai's managerial staff, she began to share and then to understand her husband's hard–driven existence as a "salary–man,"bound in lifelong, vassal–like servitude to his company.

When Alice accompanied Saburo back to Japan she was doomed to the loneliness of the dutiful Japanese wife, who waits at home as her husband devotes himself to company business, company entertaining and company social life. Through her eyes, the author reveals a world of lavish expense–account spending and squalid, cramped living conditions, of cumbersome social obligations and smouldering rivalries, in which individual initiative is smothered and private life hardly exists.