CompleteMartialArts.com - Girl in a Box
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List Price: $23.95
Our Price: $7.17
Your Save: $ 16.78 ( 70% )
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Manufacturer: HarperCollins
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
Format: Bargain Price
Label: HarperCollins
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release Date: 2006-08-29
Studio: HarperCollins
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Editorial Reviews:
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Chronically underemployed Japanese-American sleuth Rei Shimura has taken a freelance gig with a Washington, D.C., alphabet agency that just might have ties to the CIA. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, is to go undercover as a clerk in a big Tokyo department store. It's a risky assignment, but it also gives Rei a store discount that allows her to freely indulge her shopaholic tendencies. Meanwhile, she's listening in on private conversations, crashing a conference, and fending off the unwanted advances of a couple of the store's executives who seem fascinated by her navel ring. When her cover is blown, Rei is in big trouble. Suddenly she's neck-deep in something very nasty, and it will take all her resourcefulness and unorthodox methods to survive a determined killer.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Love that Sujata Massey!
Comment: A reader can't go wrong with any of the books in the Rei Shimura series. Massey creates a fascinating world of modern Japan as experienced by her heroine Rei Shimura. Rei has the perfect blend of coming from a Californian backround and being of Japanese-American parentage. It makes it easy for the reader to relate to her submersion in an unknown culture, as she seemingly blends in with her environment. It's a terrific way to learn about Japanese culture both past and present as the story develops. The series is sequential and it is best to start at the beginning and work your way through. Have fun!
Customer Rating:
Summary: This Story Made No Sense at All
Comment: The author's first book, The Salaryman's Wife, was a combination mystery and romance novel, and I didn't think it succeed very well on either score. I read it because I have been studying a little Japanese and wanted to get more insight into the Japanese culture. Like the author herself, Massey's heroine Rei is an outsider who has spent a few years in Japan and whose mastery of spoken Japanese is adequate but not much better, and whose mastery of the written language is quite weak. Thus we get an outsider's point of view, which in some ways works fairly well in a novel written for Americans. But I was a little disappointed by how superficial it seemed to be.
"The Girl in the Box" is a spy novel. Now I have read a ton of mystery novels and at one time was a fanatical fan of spy novels, and I think that in this book and that first book, Massey completely fails to understand the essence of these two genres. She fails to provide her leading character with a driving force that makes the reader feel compelled to keep turning the page. In both novels, the author fails to answer the question, "Who cares?" She doesn't show me why her heroine doesn't simply shrug her shoulder and say, "Well, okay. I gave it a good try, but this is simply too difficult for me. I have other things in my life to worry about." Toward the end, the books turn into thrillers with the heroine's life (and her lover's life) in danger, and this certainly alleviates that particular weakness in the plot. But why does she continue to forge on, putting herself more and more deeply into danger, instead of doing the sensible thing, leaving Japan completely if need be? She does indeed have the financial resources to do this.
In most other respects as well, "The Girl in the Box" is simply not plausible. Now of course in fact, almost no mysteries and espionage novels are credible if one stops and really thinks about them. Real life police work and real life espionage are nothing like what is shown in novels. (In real espionage, the primary method of acquiring information is by bribery.) And in many ways the reader can usually deal with this, and in fact is seldom really aware of it. But there is a certain level of plausibility required. Partly this is a question of the author's tone. In some books (to some extent the James Bond stories, and definitely so in their movie versions), the author is essentially saying to reader, "This is basically a comic book story, and I don't expect you to actually believe it."
But here, the author is expecting the reader to actually be willing to accept the possibility that there is a top secret government agency called the Organization for Cultural Intelligence, with headquarters in Langley and which may or may not be part of the CIA, and that this agency would mount a vaguely Watergate style covert spy operation against a Japanese department store because that store seems to be making too much money. This doesn't make the least bit of sense. And then we are expected to believe that as covert agent the agency chooses an American woman whose only qualification is that she looks Japanese (because she is of Japanese ancestry) and knows a little of the language, and has been given a few weeks training in the art of planting bugs. And her method of penetration is to get a job as a salesclerk in the store, with the expectation that somehow she will gain access to the top echelons of management.
The whole thing is ridiculous, and that means that the reader is going to perceive it as arbitrary. Instead of thinking, "I've got to know what happens next," I'm thinking, "So what is the author going to invent next to keep the plot going?"
I remember that at the end of "The Salaryman's Wife," my reaction was: "So that's it? THIS is what I read all those several hundred pages for?" And at the end of this one, I was thinking, "This woman Rei certainly is lucky! Without an incredible amount of blind luck, she would be dead by now. But why on earth did those Yakuza ever think that it was worthwhile chasing her?"
Customer Rating:
Summary: What happened??
Comment: I don't like to read spy novels. I like mysteries that center around a cultural component. I liked the constant references to culture and history that were important elements of Massey's other books. This book just reads as a very very bad spy novel. The book is just corny and colored with silly statements, like "super secret spy agency" and "Rei, you're the chosen one", that make the book even more ridiculous. I'm a big fan of Sujata Massey, but I think she really made a wrong turn in choosing to change Rei Shimura's adventures so drastically. I barely made it through Typhoon Lover because of the "spy" element. Rei is an antiques dealer not a super agent. Even her moonlighting as a PI would have been more believable than her as an agent for a "top secret" agency. I cannot express how terribly disappointed I was with this book. It's the worst in the series.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dumb Luck?
Comment: I have to admit this first: I have read each and everyone of Sujata Massey's "Rei Shimura" series. I'm addicted to them. So, forgive me while I now dope slap this Rei character.
It is inconceivable to me that anyone can continue to make so many bad and ill-planned decisions and still be alive or employable. At times, the author just makes some technical mistakes that can be annoying for this reader, at least. Example: In 'The Typhoon Lover' there is a scene where Rei is making her way through a driving rainstorm, on foot, while carrying some valuable papers under her shirt. When she arrives at her destination she feels grateful that she left them back at home where they are dry and safe. That kind of stuff just pulls me right out of the fantasy of the mystery and into the present and real world. Not why I read. Maybe Ms Massey could finish writing a critical scene before she goes to the restroom or on vacation or whatever, so she doesn't have to recall where she left off.
Rei makes alot of mistakes that are just unaccountably dense, given her obvious intelligence and bravery.
I love learning about Japanese culture and would prefer she stay in Japan longer. The scenes with her in DC are not very interesting to me personally. And I'm really glad she is done (for now) with Hugh. He seemed pretty petulant to me. Unlike some readers I don't mind the designer name dropping. She is a clotheshorse. It suits her.
I'm sure I'll read this prolific author's 2008 book as well. But, like 'Girl In a Box', I'll get it from the library and not buy it like I did all her prior books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Rei changes occupations
Comment: Underemployed Japanese-American sleuth Rei Shimura needs work so she accepts a job with some nebulous alphabet soup federal agency that is either a rival to the CIA and NSA or somehow connected to one of them. To know requires a top secret need to know clearance.
Her superior Michael Hendricks assigns Rei to go undercover as a clerk at a Tokyo department store whose profits are mind-boggling to learn how that can be. Besides struggling with why the Feds would care, she likes the assignment as she can purchase the latest in fashion using her employee discount. However, besides sexual harassment, Rei overhears the store's top manager make a death threat, which she reports to Michael. Worried about her as he is attracted to her, Michael rushes to Tokyo to allegedly protect her back. As Rei bungles with hiding her identity until she is exposed as either a CIA or espionage agent, Michael arrives in time to share a kiss.
This is a terrific espionage thriller as Rei changes occupations from sleuth to spy. Readers will enjoy her antics as she takes Tokyo like a typhoon hitting the city. Rei provides a strong anchor to the wild story line as an assimilated American struggling to adapt in her ancestors' homeland as a spy who to a degree is in the cold. The support cast is as good as they get whether it is store management harassing her naval, her agency boss kissing her, her store peers cursing her (and the customers) and the city as a whole. GIRL IN A BOX is a terrific fresh entry in this top rate Japanese American detective series.
Harriet Klausner
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