Trash (Paperback)

What happens when a spunky young Japanese woman moves in with a jaded African American? In Trash, Japanese culture comes to Harlem and receives an ambivalent welcome. When we first meet Koko, she is chained to a bed - the outcome of a bitter fight. She faces a watershed in her life in New York. Should she stay uptown in an all-consuming love-hate relationship with her older black boyfriend and his teenaged son? Or abandon even this relative security for the fast-paced escapades her downtown friends enjoy? In her first novel to be translated into English, Japan's most liberated woman writer uses the raw details of life to sort through the passions roused by love, sex, and too much drink.