Please Enjoy Your Happiness: A Memoir - Softcover

A rare and beautiful love story . . . As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation * Kirkus * Enchanting * Daily Express * A haunting memoir -- Daily Mail A moving memoir exploring the lasting imprint of his first love * The Lady * The most romantic memoir you're likely to read in a lifetime -- Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of Here's to Us

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 Cafe. 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.