Fear and Trembling

 Fear and Trembling (Note: the book is widely known by its original French title, "Stupeur et Tremblements")

Back in 2008, I read the book Fear and Trembling. Its author is Amélie Nothomb. It is a fairly short book that reads quickly. It’s not bad at all. You can read it in an afternoon when you're a bit bored. The author worked for a year in a Japanese company—she was a foreigner—and she tells us about that working year and everything she went through. She didn't have a good time at all; she was subjected to many humiliations, humiliations that the Japanese viewed as something natural. It feels as though she is trying to convey the clash of different cultures, or at least of different ways of behaving and working.

I thought I saw two messages at the end of the book. One of them tells me that the book was the result of a kind of revenge the author took against the company: while she was going through all that suffering, no one knew; now the situation is reversed, and she tells the world what that group of Japanese people was like—though anyone could associate that group with Japanese society as a whole, and I'm not sure to what extent they would be wrong. The second message relates to the goal the author set for herself and achieved with flying colors: a kind of self-improvement, a demonstration to herself of what she was worth—in this case, as a writer, as a personal success.

There are parts that are really enough to drive anyone crazy, or at least I don't understand them: attitudes she describes as if they were normal for any employee, though it seems to me she goes overboard, and her superiors were right about some things. But of course, their response was not the best—it was the absolute worst—and that's where the author is right to make this kind of accusation by describing the events. Parts of it sound a bit hysterical, and in others, you can tell she is speaking with some anger, but that's just how it seemed to me during my reading of the book. It's easy to read and well-written.

I came across this book on the recommendation of a teacher, when she commented on a custom described in it: the Japanese custom of swallowing snot instead of spitting it out when having a cold. In a couple of passages, she is harsh, but with delicacy. I was left wondering whether she uses fictional names or if they are real; I looked it up on the internet, but I didn't find anything that resolved this question for me.

A fragment of the book:

I was entering the century. It might seem strange that, after my fit of madness, things went back to normal as if nothing serious had happened. It is true that no one had seen me running around naked in the offices, nor walking on my hands, nor tumbling around with an honest computer. But, in any case, I had been found sleeping under the contents of a trash bag. In another country, I would have been fired for such behavior. Although it may not seem like it, there is a logic to this whole matter: the most authoritarian systems give rise, in the nations that apply them, to the most surprising cases of deviation—and, for that very reason, a relative tolerance regarding the most overwhelming human eccentricities. We do not know what an eccentric is until we meet a Japanese eccentric. Had I slept under the debris? They had seen it all. Japan is a country that knows what it means to "go crazy."
(pp. 68-69)