Too Late for the Festival,
Fear & Trembling,
Paine worked for a few years in Japan without having planned to; friends at HP Japan offered her a job as a technical writer. Maybe that's why she isn't embittered by having totally failed to fit into or even reliably figure out Japan or the Japanese. She barely learned the language, found out about various social taboos after having broken them frequently, and - more than once - describes something compelling that she stumbled across by accident.
Nothomb's book is autobiographical fiction. It's wonderfully short. The literary purity of having hardly any plot, but a lot of emotional reaction, is perfectly comfortable at novella-length; a lazy dinner could probably include the telling, and might. What plot there is is Failure to Adapt to an unfair corporate structure, despite speaking the language fluently. She wanted to be accepted, thought she knew how, & failed because of it; completely unlike Paine's accidental friendships.
So wrote clew in Book comparisons. , History (20th c.).