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A Memoir
by Paul Brinkley-Rogers
An evocative memoir. A beautiful journey to half a century and half a world away. An ageless love story.
Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent Paul Brinkley-Rogers has lived an adventurous life all over the world. But there is one story he cannot forget: that of his haunting love affair with a mysterious older Japanese woman in 1959. Paul was a sailor aboard the USS Shangri-La that long-ago summer when he met Kaji Yukiko in the seaport of Yokosuka. A fierce intellectual, Yukiko shared her astonishing knowledge of literature, film, and poetry with Paul and encouraged, even demanded, that he use his gifts to become the writer he is today.
But theirs was not a quiet love story. When a member of the yakuza, Japan's brutal crime syndicate, attempted to kidnap Yukiko, Paul realized that there was much more to her—and to Japan in the devastating wake of World War II—than he saw at first glance. Through the searing letters that Yukiko wrote to him and Paul's vivid telling of a history made all the more powerful and poignant by the weight of time, Please Enjoy Your Happiness reaches across decades and continents, inviting us all to revisit those loves of our lives that never do end.
BookBrowse Review
"Please Enjoy Your Happiness starts off intriguingly enough in 1959 with the author, a 19-year-old Navy man in Japan, who has a brief, unconsummated relationship with a 31-year-old Japanese woman who has a dark past and a not-so-happy present. It's interesting to know what Japan was like well after the war but Paul Brinkley-Rogers memoir becomes too ponderous. There's a fine line between storytelling and working out one's own memories on paper, and it doesn't feel like an even trade-off here. It feels like a long letter to the woman he never saw again after those few months, and while that's interesting, ultimately it's not enough to keep reading." - Rory Aronsky
Other Reviews
"Brinkley-Rogers' young innocence is poignant, and the picture he paints of times past, Japanese culture, and the making of a writer is memorable." - Booklist
"Starred Review. As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation." - Kirkus Reviews
"Enchanting." - Daily Express (UK)
"A moving memoir exploring the last imprint of his first love." - The Lady (UK)
"[A] haunting memoir." - The Daily Mail (UK)
"The most romantic memoir you're likely to read in a lifetime." - Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of Here's to Us
This information about Please Enjoy Your Happiness was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Paul Brinkley-Rogers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and veteran war correspondent. For many years he worked in Asia as a staff member of Newsweek, covering the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, the death of Chairman Mao, and Japan's economic miracle. He also reported from Latin America for The Miami Herald, sharing the Pulitzer Prize with a reporting team in 2001 for coverage of the Elian Gonzalez custody battle. He is the author of Please Enjoy Your Happiness, a memoir. Now retired, he lives in Arizona.
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