Japanese seaman Hiro Tanaka, inspired by dreams of the City of Brotherly Love and trained in the ways of the samurai, jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and swims into Tupelo Island, a nest of rabid rednecks, genteel ladies, descendants of slaves, and the denizens of an artists' colony. His arrival is not an auspicious one--he terrifies one islander literally to death. Fleeing the outraged survivors of his victim, he finds refuge in the cabin of Ruth Dershowitz, an aspiring novelist and resident of the artists' colony. Ruth, a young woman of ambiguous talent and ambivalent ambition, is simultaneously trying to prove herself as a writer, manipulate the pecking order of the colony, and carry on a thermovoltaic affair with the son of the colony's director--and Hiro suddenly finds himself a player in both scenarios.

With East Is East, T.C. Boyle--hailed by The New York Times as "one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation"--has written a sexy, savagely uproarious, cross-cultural tragicomedy of thwarted expectations, mistaken identity, love, jealousy, and betrayal.