Tokyo Ever After by Emiko Jean
Review of Tokyo Ever After by Emiko Jean
Tokyo Ever After by Emiko Jean (2021). Published by Flatiron Books.
For the longest time, I refused to read young adult novels. But, somehow, during my winter break for graduate school I ended up in this strange kind of mood where I kept checking out YA novels from the library and blowing through them.
They’re really easy to read, especially the ones that are written like Tokyo Ever After. I read this book in about an hour because of how easy and accessible the writing was, and the fact the topic itself is very simple and plain. If you were a big YA or fanfiction fan, you’re going to recognize a lot of the elements present in this story, minus the unique royal twist.
Anyways, I found out about this book because a YouTuber I watch, Zoenotzoey, listed this as one of her top reads of 2022. So, once I heard the premise and being on this massive kick for YA, I checked out the book at my local library immediately, then read it completely while sitting in the bath. Like I said, this wasn’t hard to read at all.
My feelings are mixed about this book, but I ended up reading the sequel anyways (spoiler: I hated the sequel).
Onwards with the review!
A normal California teenager finds out her long-lost father is the Prince of Japan.
Izunmi Tanaka, or as her mother calls her Zoom-Zoom, has never known her father. Her mother works at the local university and is a single mother rocking her feminist t-shirts and mugs, but Izunmi didn’t really know anything about who her father was and if he’s even still alive.
But one day, after digging through her mother’s possessions, she finds a name, and with her friends she discovers her father is the Crown Prince of Japan. Big deal, am I right? Her mother says she could potentially contact this professor that her father was friends with, so Izunmi emails him.
Not long after that, the press catches wind (I assumed the professor sold her out to the tabloids) and camps outside of Izunmi’s home.
The ambassador visits her and Izunmi decides to spend two weeks with her father and the Royal Family in Japan. On the flight there, she discovers at the end she’s rudely ignored her handsome bodyguard, a young man the same age as her. Cue: the bodyguard/royal trope that many of us have seen before. Izunmi gets smeared by the tabloids almost immediately for her lateness, getting off on the wrong foot with her team in Japan.
She meets her father, realizes he probably still loves her mother, and then the other royals. Yoshi, her cousin, seems cool at first and even sneaks her out into the nightclubs of Tokyo to experience what life is actually like in Japan. That comes to bite her literally since Yoshi turns out to be quite the snake.
Her twin cousins though seem like demons out of hell, and they set her up to fail throughout the first novel so they can watch her flail as the foreigner. At the same time, her romance with the bodyguard randomly begins to flourish—there’s honestly not a lot of build up to this, now that I’m reflecting critically—and then they’re going to cause yet another scandal.
With Izunmi grappling between the differences in the two worlds, she’s also struggling with her own identity. She only gets two weeks originally, which she extends, because who knows if she’ll ever come back (we know she will. There’s a sequel).
This is cut into between chapters by sections by the tabloids, which, to be honest, I found myself skipping towards the end. I wanted to be more immersed in the story, not the tabloids, and I think they didn’t really serve a purpose besides being there and filling the pages.
There’s the element of forbidden love because she’s a royal and he’s the bodyguard, but the interesting part of this novel to me is how they weave together Izunmi’s Americanness into her relationship.
She doesn’t look down on him as the bodyguard because of her upbringing, while her cousins might’ve turned their nose up at him immediately and treated him like trash. Her relationship with her father becomes one of the main highlights of the book as well, since they are meeting each other for the first time. Izunmi is going through a lot of change and is taking it in stride.
Overall Thoughts
I think this is a novel where you need to just take everything in and not question everything. Why did Izunmi’s mom just let her go? Why are both her mother and father still hung up on each other after all these years? We need context!
I can see how this book appeals to an Asian-American and American audience as a whole, since the incorporation of Japanese culture is pretty good, but I can also see how it is pretty superficial.
It’s full of tropes and rushes through its story to get to the parts the readers want to see, but doesn’t let us enjoy the journey of getting there. I enjoy a good story in this vein, but I found that Tokyo Ever After falls a bit short of expectations. It does have potential though, but just didn’t get there.
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