Spinning Tropics

Meet Hiro. She's tall, lanky and awkward-a twenty-something Japanese woman who has decamped to Vietnam from Tokyo to work as a language teacher. Meet Dung. She's shy, beautiful, and tough-a young Vietnamese woman studying Japanese, determined to create a better life for herself and her family. When Dung becomes one of Hiro's students, they are instantly drawn to each other. For both of them, it is their first time in love with another woman. But when Konno, an older Japanese businessman, befriends Hiro, Dung begins to grow unbearably jealous. What unfolds is a love triangle with very complicated, ultimately devastating, results. Set against the backdrop of a Vietnam on the economic rise, debut novelist Aska Mochizuki vividly brings to life the buzz of motorcycles and the tastes of Vietnamese coffee and spicy papaya salads; the confines of the Vietnamese family; the lingering effects of long wars; the rich who ride the economic wave and the poor who are left behind.Spinning Tropicsis a lush and evocative story of an intoxicating love affair.

Aska Mochizuki was born in Tokyo in 1973. In 1992, after graduating from high school, she found employment at a computer company. But she left the corporate world in 1994 to travel around Australia by bus, taking on a series of part-time jobs (as a shark fisherman's helper and a cleaning woman at a backpacker's hostel, to name a few.) She returned home and attended university, graduating in 2002 with a teaching certificate. She embarked immediately to Vietnam, to teach Japanese, and returned home to Tokyo in 2004, where she began to write. Spinning Tropics was the 2007 winner of the Knopf Kodansha Prize.