A love song to the melting pot that is Lower Manhattan with its rich mix of young people looking for love in all the wrong places, this is the coming-of-age story of twenty-year-old Yurika Song, a Korean-Japanese woman who comes from Japan to New York City for a summer to work at her Korean relatives' grocery store and to improve her English. Yurika's friends back home have always joked that she is half-sushi/half-kimchi. But cross-Asian ethnicities turn out to be far less jarring than her entree into a New York street life where bicycle messengers rule.
On one level this is the tale of mistaken love--Yurika falls hard for the wrong bike messenger, an attractive, but dangerous, Puerto Rican biker nicknamed "Bone." But on another, deeper level, our heroine finds freedom in this new world and in this new language, which to her "is like a huge octopus, very clever and sometimes hard to catch."
On one level this is the tale of mistaken love--Yurika falls hard for the wrong bike messenger, an attractive, but dangerous, Puerto Rican biker nicknamed "Bone." But on another, deeper level, our heroine finds freedom in this new world and in this new language, which to her "is like a huge octopus, very clever and sometimes hard to catch."