You have either experienced unemployment or know someone who has. But what is it like to endure joblessness in a foreign country in the middle of an economic crisis? How would one survive cash-strapped circumstances in an insular nation for close to a year? In his beautiful and intelligently written travel memoir, Wayne Lionel Aponte tackles these questions as he tells his intimate, first-person, true story about triumphing over adversity, in the form of being broke and American, in Japan, during the country’s worst recession, since the Second World War.