Synopses & Reviews
A beautiful young American travels across the world, only to surrender to another cultures macabre nightmares.
The Floating World transports us to present-day Tokyo, where avant-garde dancers twist their lives together with renegade geisha, and reality bleeds into fantasy like desire into flesh.
Liza leaves her Ivy-league life behind and escapes to Tokyo, a place where art, politics, and sex seep into each other, and the irradiated ghosts of World War II pulse beneath the neon nightlife. She intends to study butoh, otherwise known as the dance of utter darkness, with master teacher Oshima Kenzo. While working in one of Tokyos infamous hostess bars, Liza meets the mysterious Maboroshi, leader of the maiko, a group of neophyte geisha whose expression is as violent as the dance of utter darkness itself. Lizas journey culminates in the discovery of the most exclusive restaurant in Japan, where men eat intricate delicacies directly off a naked human body. Descending into this midnight underworld, Liza becomes fragmented, delicate, lost: a stranger in her own skin.
From an exciting new voice in fiction comes a sexy, dark literary debut steeped in the rich customs and rituals of Japan. As tempting and tactile as folds of silk, The Floating World is an evocative novel of the flesh that will seduce readers with its sensuous prose. Like the dance that runs through it, the story is a hypnotic exchange: a movement of back and forth, open and shut, secret and revealed.
Review
"There are some overblown elements in this first novel, but overall it gracefully chronicles a young woman's struggles with how the world she inhabits views her." Booklist
Review
"While explanations of Japanese history and culture sometimes break up the text, the prose can be beautiful, with lyrical descriptions of dance, pain and enchantment with foreignness and self....Gralla succeeds in creating an intelligent contemporary heroine whose perceptive insights illuminate past and future, East and West." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
A provocative, imaginative novel set in modem day Japan, a place where art, politics and sex are all linked. Liza, a young American student, moves to Japan and is led into the surreal adventures of the maiko, a group of renegade neophyte geisha whose art and expression are as violent and extreme as the dance of utter darkness.
About the Author
Cynthia Gralla is studying for her Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where she focuses on Japanese, English, and Spanish literature. She has written articles for Salon.com. She lives in Berkeley, California.