Audrey Hepburns Neck by Alan
Brown
The Enormous Entertainment In Other People's Secrets
Alan Browns first novel is a comic tale of sexual desire and bad manners
set in contemporary Tokyo. Twenty-three-year-old cartoonist Toshi is
obsessed with slim American women, and his best friend, an American
named Paul, is obsessed with Japanese men. Toshi begins having an
affair with Jane, his English teacher, who turns out to be insane; Paul has
an endless stream of Japanese boyfriends all of whom leave him. Audrey
Hepburns Neck is slyly funny and very observant. Brown is equally
concerned with sex as an obsession and the erotics of cultural
differences, but his comic masterstrokes are in being able to conjure up
the humor in looking for sex and the sometimes tragedy in getting it.
Audrey Hepburns Neck is resonant, charming and very witty.
Personal Review: Audrey Hepburns Neck by Alan Brown
The Neck in the title is the foundation of T's erotic fascination with
Europeans. He had seen Audrey Hepburn in a movie when he was nine
and his mother had remarked on the beauty of her neck. Necks have a

more central erotic role in the Japanese imagination than they do in ours
and so our hero's feet are set on the romantic path that leads him to this
story.( The cover, by the way, makes this particular fetish believable even
if it's not your own. There is a wonderful erotic quality to that silver-green
neck. . .)
Toshi Okamoto is 23 years old and he is half-buried in secrets. The most
fundamental one is about his parents, their histories and their separation.
The most immediate one is the Inscrutability of the West, as Toshi, smitten
with European women struggles to understand the various westerners in
his life.
The action takes place in Hokkaido and in the congested neighborhood
around Shibuya station. "Congested" is a bit of an understatement. Before
I saw it, I could not have imagined the density of people, light, sound,
movement and anticipation that is Shibuya. Hokkaido, on the other hand is
Japan's mid-west, laid back and naive. These contrasts play out in Toshi's
take on the westerners in his life-he is both wise and gullible about them.
A good companion volume would be Asleep.
Lynn Hoffman, author of the very entertaining bang BANG
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