Author: Sarah Z. Sleeper

Publisher: Running WildPress,
ISBN:  978-1-947041-67-7

Sarah Z. Sleeper spent twenty-five years as a business and technology writer which won her three journalism awards and a Fellowship at the National Press Foundation. (2020, p.236) She holds an MFA (2012) in Creative Writing. Gaijin is her first novel. She has had her poetry published in A Year In Ink, San Diego Poetry Annual, Painters and Poets and exhibited at the Bellarmine Museum.  A Few Innocuous Lines got an award from Writer’s Digest. On Getting Vivian was published in the Shanghi Literary Review. Sleeper was editor at New Rivers Press and editor-in-chief for Mason’s Road a literary journal.


Gaijin is about a young woman who is studying journalism at Northwestern University by the name of Lucy. Lucy is sort of a loner with the exception her friend Rose. In her junior year of college, she meets a young man from Japan who changes the direction of her life forever more. His name is Owen and he is from Tokyo.  

Lucy’s dad also died the same year she met Owen and she is emotionally fragile. Her mother is near catatonic. She skips a year of school to try to piece her life back together. She is semi-successful, but still pushing down so many critical emotions.  

Lucy and Owen strike up an unlikely friendship which Lucy is sure is far more. His emotions for her run hot and cold. She meets his mother and he tells his mother that Lucy wants to see Japan, especially Tokyo. She is in love with him and when he suddenly drops out of school and moves back to Tokyo she is forlorn. She cannot imagine why he left and what her life will be without him. She sets her sights on completing school, taking a so-so job until she can get one in Japan. 

Finally, Lucy gets a job offer in Okinawa for a small local newspaper as a junior reporter. They offer to pay for her to relocate there. She has many ideas about what Japan is based on what Owen has told her, none of what jibe with the reality of her arrival. 

Lucy makes it her destiny to locate Owen and get him to marry her.  The only thing she is sure of is that Owen has a brother who works at the same small newspaper as a photojournalist and she thinks he can help her get to Owen. 

Will she like her new job? Will she locate Owen? 

This is a sweet story about young love. I enjoyed it and if you are looking for a light winter read this is the perfect book.