At first glance, ‘Sayonara Bar’ by Susan Barker appears to be a tale of Japan’s Sex industry. There is Mary, a hostess in the Sayonara Bar who massages salary men’s egos for her weekly wage. Mr Sato forced out of his rut by his boss to go to the Sayonara Bar and experience a little debauchery. Watanabe, the bar’s cook, who exists “in his own manga-fuelled fantasy of the fourth dimension, and believes he can see into other people’s souls, as well as into the gurgling viscera of their souls”.

The Sayonara Bar’s matron is the mother of Mary’s boyfriend, Yuji; a man that Watanabe believes it is his duty to protect her from. He follows her with his fourth dimension ability to see everything and everyone and all that they are doing. Although I suppose that Barker’s idea of explaining how Watanabe can see other character’s ovarian cysts and faecal functions is her way of showing us the various ways his fourth dimension abilities work, I really didn’t want to know. Watanabe is a likeable character, but only because his puppy dog-esque adoration of Mary is something most women will find likeable. Otherwise, he is a socially retarded and delusional outcast with nothing to his personality other than his ability to cook and his imagined hero trip with Mary. Unfortunately, his random ‘jumps’ into the fourth dimension were almost a comedy element for me, although, it did give me a break from descriptions of Watanabe cooking badly and hiding under his baseball cap. When I thought he was dead, I was happy for him, it would have given him a break from his ridiculous existence. Barker’s sporadic and minute attempts to expand Watanabe as a character are pointless, as they aren’t worked on in any great detail and they have no bearing on the narrow world of the story.

None of Barker’s main characters are given much more of a personality than what we find them with when we start to read about them. I gathered from reading the book that Mr Sato’s wife killed herself and that he refuses to believe she actually killed herself. It is fairly obvious that the woman is dead from the beginning as Mr Sato’s narration is always directed toward her, sometimes at their family shrine. It is a ridiculous twist of affairs that one of the other hostesses at the Sayonara Bar has to be taken over by the spirit of his wife, in order for him to realise this. Mr Sato is not a likeable character, he reminds me of other male Japanese characters I’ve come across in the likes of Ishiguro’s books; narrow minded, chauvinistic, and socially inept. I have no idea if this is an accurate description of Japanese men, but I’m not encouraged to find out.

Mary is the only likeable character in the book, but even she becomes tiring halfway through, I can only read so much chain smoking and wandering around after a guy who obviously has no real interest in her before I want to find her and slap her. Barker’s half-hearted attempts at expanding her characters fail slightly less with Mary, perhaps because she’s a woman. I had a better idea of where she was coming from by the end of the book than the other two characters. On the whole though, I didn’t in why Barker bothered to write the book, it came from nowhere, it went nowhere and it bored me.