In 1985 and 1986, the residents of a Tokyo suburb were treated to a singular sight. Just before ten every weekday morning, a pale-faced, wild-haired foreigner came scurrying out of her apartment, tucked her full skirt between her legs, mounted a bicycle and pedaled off furiously, heading east. At around six-thirty, her neighbors saw her again, pedaling home with her bicycle basket full of Haagen-Daz ice cream and Shredded Wheat. Rhiannon Paine, 37, was working as a technical writer for Hewlett-Packard in Silicon Valley; she agreed reluctantly to transfer to their Tokyo branch. She had no idea what she was in for, and neither did her Japanese colleagues. While they coped with her social gaffes, like arriving late to work and blowing her nose in public, Paine struggled with Japanese food -- deviant sea-creatures on rice -- and with the Japanese language, which kept tripping her up with new verb tenses ( the conditional, the volitional, the passive, the causative, the potential ). Paine writes with wonderful humor about the good times -- spending an evening with a Shinto priest, drinking sake out of a bamboo pole and trying to make herself presentable on the beach with a package of inadequate Japanese nipplecovers. She collects weird English slogans printed on Japanese products (from a packet of instant coffee: Ease Your Bosoms). But she is also honest about her loneliness and sense of dislocation. A slim 5`4, Paine towers over most of her Japanese colleagues. She unconsciously contracts her back muscles trying to make herself smaller, and develops back pain for the first time in her life, a condition she calls being bonsai`d. Her in-depth contact with a radically differentculture raises questions she couldn`t begin to answer. If I hadn`t been born American, would I still be restless, ambitious, contrary-minded? Could the same raw material, worked upon by a different society, have produced a tea-making office lady or a contented housewife? This insightful and