Gralla's intricately plotted debut novel parallels the shifting, snaking streets of the Japan she describes. The dark story of art, lust and escape follows Liza, an American college student who travels to Japan to study butoh, a Japanese dance form translated as "the dance of utter darkness," and becomes entangled in Tokyo's sexual underworld. Unlike Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World, Gralla's floating world is one not of high art but of raw sex, of a smart but lost young woman encountering the maiko—geishas-in-training—and all manner of lovers in her quest for self-understanding and, maybe more than she realizes, acceptance. Gralla focuses intently on Liza's body, which she describes as becoming more lithe, thin and fragile, suggesting that inner purity is being achieved through the diminution of the body in space. 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 ("I was willing to do anything—fly continents, say, or bloody my hair—if it might only allow me to discard that thing in myself which had been weighed and found wanting"). Gralla succeeds in creating an intelligent contemporary heroine whose perceptive insights illuminate past and future, East and West. (Mar.)
