Please Enjoy Your Happiness is a beautifully written coming-of-age memoir based on the English author's summer-long love affair with a remarkable older Japanese woman. Whilst serving as a seaman at the age of nineteen, Paul Brinkley-Rogers met Kaji Yukiko, a sophisticated, highly intellectual Japanese woman, who was on the run from her vicious gangster boyfriend, a member of Japan's brutal crime syndicate the yakuza.
Trying to create a perfect experience of purity, she took him under her wing, sharing their love of poetry, cinema and music and many an afternoon at the Mozart Café. Brinkley-Rogers, now in his seventies, re-reads Yukiko's letters and finally recognizes her as the love of his life, receiving at last the gifts she tried to bestow on him. Reaching across time and continents, Brinkley-Rogers shows us how to reclaim a lost love, inviting us all to celebrate those loves of our lives that never do end.
'I had been in love with you and I had not fallen out of love. You had stopped writing to me but you lingered, at first a presence, and then a fragrance I sensed in shadows, and then a faint voice carried on winds that crossed the sea.'
Sometimes it takes a lifetime to recognize our one true love
While serving as a nineteen-year-old seaman in Japan, Paul Brinkley-Rogers met Kaji Yukiko, a sophisticated, highly intellectual older woman, who was on the run from her vicious gangster boyfriend, a member of the brutal Japanese crime syndicate, the yakuza. Through one pure and perfect summer, Paul and Yukiko shared their love of poetry, cinema and music.
Now in his seventies, Paul rediscovers Yukiko's letters and finally receives the gifts she tried to bestow on him all those years before. Reaching across time and continents, Brinkley-Rogers shows us how to reclaim a lost love, inviting us all to celebrate those loves of our lives that never do end.
Please Enjoy Your Happiness is a remarkable true story for anyone who has ever been in love.
'The most romantic memoir you're likely to read in a lifetime' Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of Here's to Us
'A moving memoir' The Lady
'Enchanting' Daily Express
'A haunting memoir' Daily Mail
A rare and beautiful love story . . . As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation
