“I sell my time and kill my body…”Margaret is a woman who lives for the downward spiral. Fleeing from Canada to escape her past, Margaret settles in Tokyo to work for Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute. There, she immerses herself in drugs and sex to forget her family and repress memories of her brother Frank: The brother who tried to kill her.Sharing an apartment with her friend Ines, another fellow Canadian, Margaret ingests illegal substances, drinks herself into stupors and tries to ignore her past and where she came from. Drugs and booze will only blind for a moment; sex gives her another outlet, another way to forget, while hands are caressing her body.Margaret? Margaret I need you to call me. There’s been an accident-Margaret trains doll-like Japanese women to be stewardesses, to fly high in the skies. “Air Pro: Putting young women in the air. Where they belong.” But her past still gnaws at her, still tries to push forth into her consciousness. More drugs and booze don’t help; the cocaine and beer concoction no longer purify her thoughts, no longer help her to forget. She is no longer able to stay lost. That all changes when Margaret meets Kazu.Kazu is a mysterious gangster; tattoos mark his muscled body and his eyes are dark and full of shadows. They engage in sex, in lust. Kazu takes Margaret to a Love Hotel. There are hundreds of Love Hotels in Tokyo, lurid places with themed rooms and no human attendants. You choose a room from a lit up display and have a rest (three hours) or a stay (all night). Which room will you choose?Immortality is not an optionMargaret becomes obsessed with the pictures, the face, of a girl reported to be dead. Abducted and killed, if rumor is to be believed. But Margaret sees her face everywhere: in alleyways, on posters, in the subway. Margaret begins to search for the lost girl, realizing that she is one herself.Despite her best intentions, Margaret finds herself falling for the tattooed Kazu, but their love comes with complications. Margaret can no longer pretend she does not love Kazu, but he has not been honest with her. He is married, and in Tokyo, it is best not to battle with the wife. Mistresses have been known to perish at the hands of knife handling wives.Don’t fight a Japanese wife…so sharp, you don’t even feel it…Kazu tells Margaret to leave, to go back to Canada. But how can Margaret leave the man she loves? She continues to pine for Kazu, who tries to keep his distance. She sees the missing girl everywhere now. She fills Margaret’s dreams, her waking hours.Before her stay in Tokyo is over, Margaret must confront her past if she is to survive. She also must confront herself, to free herself before the downward spiral claims her, or be lost forever.“Lost Girls and Love Hotels” is Christine Hanrahan’s first novel and that’s a crying shame. After I had finished the book, I scoured the Internet to find out if she had written anything else I could get my hands on, to no avail. As soon as I finished reading “Lost Girls and Love Hotels”, I started reading it again. I’m now reading it for a third time. The book is just that good. It’s the best book I’ve read in years.From the first page, the story is just so consuming, so engrossing, that you can do nothing but turn the pages and continue on it’s wild, lustful ride. She uses writing devices (like flash backs and talking in third person whenever Margaret is on a drug binge) like a pro. Hanrahan is a natural at creating mood, using words to her advantage and letting us see inside her protagonist’s head. “Lost Girls and Love Hotels” is proof of her skill and it’s one damn great book.What makes the novel so interesting is that it doesn’t hold back any secrets. We know everything (or almost everything) from the beginning; Hanrahan has set up a line of dominoes, long and curvy, and is about to flick the first one. All we have to do is watch the rest of the line fall; and be amazed.All I can say is: Read this book. It’s amazing, the ending is a shocker and it will be the best book you have read in years. I, for one, can’t wait for Hanrahans next offering.
Catherine Hanrahan's debut novel Lost Girls and Love Hotels is the story of a stranger in a strange land. The stranger is Margaret, a young woman who teaches English (or English pronounciation) in a stewardess school and the strange land is Japan. On surface this could be the story of any 20-something searching for identity, salving old wounds with sex and drugs. Dig a little deeper, however, and you see that there is much more than meets the eye. Like most young women who have absent fathers, distracted mothers, and emotionally disturbed siblings, Margaret thinks she is running away, but what she really is doing is finding a way to save herself, looking for love (albeit in all the wrong places), and soothing herself with drugs and sex. She is, after all, still trapped in childhood; an adult who still sucks her thumb in order to fall asleep. When Margaret's lover, Kazu, asks her why she came to Japan, Margaret responds, "To be alone." Of course, he finds this response odd, and so she follows up with, "It's an easy place to be alone." Is this book specifically about life in Japan? Could it not have been set anywhere? I would argue the latter, as it seems to me the message is universal. Anyone who has ever felt as though she were running away, will see herself in this book. Anyone who has lived on an edge waiting for death, will also. And those who have been lost and found--those who have lived despite all of the odds against them (instead of being the unfortunates whose remains are later found), will find the ending triumphant. In a way, life in Japan destroys Margaret (and almost kills her) and as such, it allows her to be reborn: "I stand like a planet, the constellation of seeds radiating from me, spilling from my pockets. I see, as if for the first time, the quality of the air. Bluish light filtered through it. The sun, like a yolk hanging languorously behind the trees. The air with its giddy bite of anticipation. I breathe it in like anesthesia, but it doesn't put me to sleep. It wakes me up."
Do You like book Lost Girls And Love Hotels (2006)?
When I met Catherine Hanrahan at a book signing, I asked her if her book was Chick Lit. The cover of the book is screaming pink with an anima style drawing of a woman wrapped in sheets, gazing at me with paint-on-velvet eyes. Upon hearing this question, Hanrahan’s eyes registered hurt with a sliver of anger, then turned to defense. I think her companion actually gasped. No, she said. Her book was anything but Chick Lit. She didn’t see why I would have thought such a thing.Well, she was right. Lost Girls and Love Hotels is not Chick Lit. Lost Girls is about a Canadian girl who went to Japan for some privacy. Anyone who has ever used a crowd as a blanket will understand that. The backdrop of Tokyo makes this a fun read for western women. The cultural disparity between east and west makes for an atmosphere akin to Hello Kitty in a porn flick.The story is solid, has depth and deserves attention. However, this debut novel is just that. I expect to see some good things from Hanrahan in the future. Lost Girls combines the banality of youth, the disorientation of living in a foreign country, and the angst of an adolescence not left behind. But, stylistically, it is distracting. The book jerked me from one perspective to another, going from a barrage of sentence fragments to run-ons. The story shifted from first to second person and then back again. I’m sure that these shifts were an intentional move on behalf of literary license, but I just found myself wanting to reach for a red pen.
—Nancyc
I was a sucker for "Lost in Tokyo" stories long before Sofia C. & Bill Murray got "Lost in Translation"; and a "Lost in Tokyo" story is exactly what this book is. This book, however, adds a layer of suspense and paranoia by tossing a serial killer tale into the mix of the usual frothy Sex, Neon and Booze soaked ambience that tends to pervade any "Gaijin in the Capital City" story. Perfect reading for the bus or a lazy afternoon involving cake. Or Sour Patch Kids. Anyway, you get the point: A guilty pleasure but one with some guts. Literally.
—Paul
It’s a bit hard to believe that Lost Girls And Love Hotels is Catherine Hanrahan’s first novel. A small book full of quick wit, vivid descriptions and emotional longings, the prose in this book is top notch and wastes no time pulling its reader in for the taking.I started reading this book on a Sunday night and had it finished by that Tuesday, because I couldn’t seem to put the thing down. Needless to say, I really, really enjoyed this book. The prose was exactly what I like in a book – lush, a little bit wry, and with the sort of candidness that sometimes gets a person into trouble. If you’ve ever wanted to know the ins and outs of what it’s like to live abroad in a place as striking as Japan, or wanted to experience (even if just vicariously) Tokyo’s neon-coloured and elaborate nightlife, this is definitely a book you should read. Catherine Hanrahan lived in Tokyo for a time herself, so her descriptions are really precise and you can trust that her chronicles of Tokyo from a young visitor’s perspective are true to life.My only criticism of the book is that I wished it was a tad lengthier, and I don’t mean that in a selfish “I love this book, I never want it to be over” sort of way. I wanted the character of Kazu to be more fleshed out. I suppose the vagueness was purposeful, as the book is meant to be seen from only Margaret’s perspective (we know only what she knows). But even still, an added 15 to 20 pages could have really benefited the development of Kazu’s character in particular, since the idea of who he is is so incredibly fascinating.This is a book I’m certain to add to my list of books to recommend to my fellow bookworms, and if you’re a fan of the film Lost In Translation, Melissa Bank, or Francesca Lia Bock’s early work, I’d especially recommend this amazing little novel to you.
—Amanda
