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In the memoir Potato in a Rice Bowl, Peggy Keener shares her wacky misadventures as a sincere-though misguided-Minnesota housewife struggling to create normalcy for her family while living in Japan during the 1960s. Through charming vignettes, Peggy takes a look back at her bewildering foray into the Japanese culture after her husband accepts a military assignment in a country thousands of miles away from the small prairie town of Austin, Minnesota, where she was born and raised. The mother of three boys, Peggy chronicles how she managed to settle her disoriented family and flounce headfirst into the thorny, baffling culture while her husband was miles away on military missions. As she bungles through her boys' Japanese school, grapples with the eccentricities of her home and neighbors, and reconstructs the language to her liking, she somehow ends up as a personality on Japanese national television-all with the earnest hope of melding with her new country. In this humorous, irreverent, and even soul-searching collection of anecdotes, Peggy provides an entertaining glimpse into the enigmatic Land of the Rising Sun.
A review of Potato in a Rice Bowl by Peggy Keener. Carl Nomura, Port Townsend, WA.What a wonderful book! Let me describe how she had impacted my life. I am 99.99 % done with my book. All I need is a final editing and finding a publisher. I'm installing Foucauld pendulum in my house like the ones you see swinging in museums, I am writing two other books, I had been reading Anna Karenina, East of Eden, the History of Knowledge, and studying differential geometry. Also, I was preparing a lecture on Interesting Numbers and I exercised and took a walk every other day.Since I loaded her book on my Kindle, I stopped all of these activities. On the first day, I read until 3 AM, when the juice ran out on my Kindle. I cursed the blasted gizmo. Impatiently, I charged it for only a half an hour so that I read some more. I had been reading her book day and night. I'm like a zombie. When I got to chapter 90, when Matt was only 4, I wanted it to continue another 90. I finished the book at 5 AM today.What's the attraction? It is because she writes so well and with great humor. Her choice of words is superb! I knew all of her expressions such as shiiiish, la-de-dam and Geez-:ouise. I can relate to so much of what she wrote because I know the culture, speak the language, and have visited Japan at least 20 times. I can relate to the period she wrote about. I wondered if young people today know who Daddy Warbucks was? I also had a '60 microbus when I lived in Florida. My favorite chapter described what happened when she invited the whole kindergarden class to her home. The kids went straight to little Erin to examine the baby. She stole the show and the kids ignored the rest of her home. I liked the loving care she gave her children. No doubt they turned out well. Did Matt find something to outrank more than a bug? I like the scene of Peggy at 27 running on the beach naked. I did that once when I was 33.Early in the book, I imagined her being 5' 6" and not 5' 2" because of her big presence. I fell in love, hopelessly, with the author. I ordered the book because I wanted to see the picture of a white haired Jeff among the black haired yoichien students. My daughter, Teri, wants to read it because I talked about it so much. I'm sure I will read it at least two more times like I did War and Peace. I give it five-stars.
