Alan Brown

Audrey Hepburns Neck: A Novel

Alan Brown

• 1996 Kiriyama winner
• Score: 10.46

Offering a unique perspective and unusual insight into modern Japan and its wartime past, Audrey Hepburn’s Neck is also a shrewd study of cross-cultural obsessions, and of erotic, romantic and familial love.

The American author Alan Brown crosses both racial and cultural lines to tell his story through the eyes of a young, handsome Japanese cartoonist, Toshiyuki (“Toshi”) Okamoto, who traces his strong attraction to Western women bock to his ninth birthday, when his mother took him to see Audrey Hepburn in the movie “Roman Holiday.”

Leaving behind a sad, silent childhood—which was spent living in two rooms above the family noodle shop on an isolated peninsula in the far north of Japan—Toshi moves to Tokyo to pursue his career. There he falls under the spell of three Americans: his best friend and confidante, the generous and extroverted Paul, a gay advertising copywriter who has plenty of his romantic mishaps with Japanese men; Jane, his glamorous but emotionally unstable teacher at the Very Romantic English Academy, with whom Toshi has a hazardous sexual affair; and,…