Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami, translated by Stephen Snyder (Kodansha)

Trying to categorize Ryu Murakami’s novel Coin Locker Babies is an exercise in futility. it doesn’t follow any known patterns. Is it science-fiction, is it horror, is it a love story. It’s actually all those things and more. 

This book was originally published in the Japanese language in 1980 by Kodansha. It won the Noma Literary New Face Prize in 1981. A prize established by Seiji Noma, the first president and founder of Kodansha Publishing. 

The book centers on two main characters - Kikuyuki Sekiguchi and Hashio Mizouchi. The only thing these two boys have in common is that they were abandoned by their mothers and left in a coin locker in an unnamed station in Tokyo in the summer of 1972. They were the only two babies to survive the ordeal. They were usually called by their nicknames - Kiku and Hashi.

The two boys became wards of an orphanage in Yokohama and became friends as Kiku always came to the aid of Hashi, who was often bullied. Most of the other kids avoided both boys. They also behaved in unusual ways so the nuns finally took them to see a psychiatrist. Their treatment consisted of having the boys listen to an in utero heartbeat without their knowledge. The therapy was supposed to help calm them down. 

The boys were eventually adopted by a couple named the Kuwayamas before they were to begin school. They grew up on a small island off of Kyushu. On the island they discover an abandoned mining town. Their foster parents have always told them to avoid that place but they were young and full of mischief. There, they meet a man they called Gazelle. One of the last words Gazelle says to Kiku is DATURA. He tells him not to forget it. That it will come in handy one day. 

In junior high, Kiku found that he was adept at pole-vaulting and soon that became the focus of his life. Hashi was proud of him and would tell others that Kiku was his big brother. In high school, Kiku becomes even more serious about pole-vaulting but on the day of an important competition Hashi is nowhere to be seen. Kiku’s foster mother shows him a note that Hashi left. Hashi went to Tokyo.

As the story progresses, Kiku and his foster mother go to Tokyo to look for Hashi but do not succeed at first. During their search, they are accosted by some unruly characters. One knocks his mother over who falls and hits her head. She later dies in the hotel they’re staying at. 

Kiku finds Hashi in a fictional area of Tokyo called Toxitown. An area that is surrounded by barbed wire and the outskirts are partrolled by some military types who are ordered to shoot anything that moves if they try to get in. 

Kiku finds Hashi in Toxitown. He also meets a woman named Anemone who becomes his girlfriend. Hashi is now a bisexual singer discovered by a man named D who decides to become Hashi’s manager. He markets Hashi by making public that Hashi’s origins was being an abandoned baby in a coin locker.

As Hashi’s music begins to sell, Mr D has a promotional stunt set up where Hashi will meet his mother who abandoned him on live television. When Kiku sees Hashi break down on TV, he goes to Hashi’s rescue and ends up shooting the woman who turns out to be his own mother. 

Kiku is sent to a Juvenile Detention Center for five years and during that time, Hashi’s music becomes even more popular. However, Hashi is slowly losing his mind while Kiku thinks of escaping and finding DATURA, a lethal substance he plans to use on the city of Tokyo to get his revenge against everybody. 

This book certainly isn’t for the weak of heart. It’s also very difficult to be sympathetic to either Kiku or Hashi even if the reader is aware of their unfortunate beginnings. If you’re in the mood for a dystopic vision of Tokyo, then Coin Locker Babies might be the right book for you. ~Ernie Hoyt

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa (Harper Perennial)

Takako is in love, a blissful state that lasts for a year, until the day her boyfriend tells her he’s getting married. Worse yet, he’s been with his fiancee for twice as long as he’s been dating Takako. Making this scenario completely disastrous is the fact that Takako works with the man who’s just dumped her--but not completely. “You know, we can still see each other sometimes,” he tells her magnanimously.

Engulfed in grief, Takako leaves her job and goes into hibernation, “drifting all alone through outer space.” After a month of misery, she gets a phone call from an uncle she hasn’t seen in years, a man who owns a small used bookstore and needs an assistant. The offer comes with a place to live, a room above the shop.

Takako is running out of money. Faced with living in a Tokyo bookshop or returning home where her mother will speedily arrange a marriage for her, she accepts her uncle’s offer. 

Immediately struck by the musty smell of old paper and the staggering number of old books that have even encroached upon the room that’s meant to be hers, Takako is less than charmed with this new living arrangement. She’s never been a reader and the smell of the shop is overwhelming. “Try to imagine it as the dampness after a morning rain,” her uncle suggests but the mustiness even pervades her futon while the looming presence of books disturbs her sleep. One night she picks up a volume, hoping it will bore her into somnolence. Instead she stays up almost until dawn, ensnared by Until the Death of the Girl by Sasei Muro. From that point on, the bookshop becomes a paradise of possibility and Takako turns into an ardent reader.

Quickly Satoshi Yagisawa throws his readers into four different love stories: Takako’s heartbreak, her uncle’s devotion to the wife who has deserted him, the young server at a coffee shop who is desperately besotted with his coworker, and Takako’s gradual attraction to a bookshop customer who chats with her over coffee. The most irresistible love, however, is the one Takako develops for books, the bookshop, and the street where it makes its home. Yasukuni Street is an avenue filled with bookshops that have been selling secondhand books since the end of the nineteenth century. Since each shop specializes in a different field of interest, they coexist in a friendly manner in what Takako’s uncle claims is “the largest concentration of secondhand bookshops in the world.”

This, translator Eric Ozawa says in his Translator’s Note, isn’t fiction. Yagisawa has set his Morisaki Bookshop in central Tokyo’s Jimbocho District, a neighborhood that holds anywhere from 150 to 180 bookshops, each with its own specialty. 

No wonder Takako becomes a bibliophile. She lives in an area where books are the reason for its existence, with everyone on its streets browsing, buying, and discussing books, breathing in their odor that her uncle likens to petrichor. “The whole place,” Takako comes to realize, “felt like the setting for an adventure.”

Within this setting, the different love stories are burnished with a sweetness that never becomes cloying. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is both comforting and restorative, in a world of overstuffed novels and gloomy appraisals of the current condition.  This slender little novella has been translated into fifteen different languages since  its Japanese debut in 2010. Charming without being overly whimsical and firmly rooted in fact, not fantasy, this is a book that book lovers will buy for their friends while being sure to keep one for themselves.~Janet Brown

Tokyo on Foot : Travels in the City's Most Colorful Neighborhoods by Florent Chavouet (Tuttle)

Florent Chavouet is a graphic artist who spent six months wandering around different neighborhoods in Tokyo while his girlfriend Claire was interning at some company in Japan. The only reason why he found himself in Japan.  He would go out with a set of sketchbooks and colored pencils along with a mamachari (a term used for the bicycles that most housewives use) and a folding chair. The result of his stay and his sketches led to the publication of Tokyo on Foot : Travels in the City’s Most Colorful Neighborhoods.

Chavouet’s opening statement in the book is “Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities.”  He also mentions in the beginning, “So this is a book about Japan. About a trip to Tokyo, to be precise. It’s neither a guide nor an adventure story, but that doesn’t mean you’ll avoid the out-of-date addresses of one or the digressive confidences of the other.” 

The six months period of Chavouet’s stay was between June and December, 2006. All the sketches included in the book are Chavouet’s interpretation of what he saw and how he saw the city’s neighborhoods. He has organized the book in which every chapter focuses on a certain neighborhood he visited. “The respective lengths of chapters in no way indicate the relative importance of the neighborhoods in the life of the city but rather my familiarity with them.” 

Each chapter is announced by a koban, a small and very local police station, often referred to as a police box whose officers main job is community policing. The illustration following the koban is a hand drawn map of the area listing the places that Chavouet thought were interesting 

Once you read the blurbs on the map and take the time to absorb it all into your head, then Chavouet then provides full color illustrations of those various neighborhoods, along with the people who inhabit the place such as the owner of a small shop in Machiya, located in the northern part of Tokyo. He also meets and draws pictures of a woman who runs an okonomiyaki stand in Takadanobaba at the Kotohira-gu Temple. This is where Chavouet also meets a Canadian graphic designer who told him about his lung operation and meditating on the Ganges in India. The Canadian left and came back later and handed Chavouet two-thousand yen for no apparent reason. Chavouet jokes it’s “the first money I earned in Japan.” 

In between many of the chapters of the book are “interludes” where Chavouet just indulges himself such as drawing his interpretations of the Strict Salaryman and the Cool Salaryman. The difference between Math Nerd Junior-High Student and Physics Nerd Junior-High Student. They are amusing and humorous and will put a smile on your face. 

He also draws from his experience as he tells us his impression of visiting a manga kissa, a shop that carries manga books guessing what the topics are just by looking at the covers. He surmises that the main themes are, “porn (soft, hard, kinky, gay, etc.), romantic stuff, and some sports”. 

As Chavouet mentions, this is not a guidebook, just what he saw and sketched when he wandered around Japan. He explored the neighborhoods of Machiya, Ikebukuro, Takadanobaba, Shinjuku, Shibuya, and more. Trendy neighborhoods, downtown neighborhoods, old neighborhoods, new ones. Every page is a visual treasure.

As a former and long-time resident of Tokyo, I can attest to the accuracy of the neighborhoods Chouvet has visited. His eye for detail is amazing. His illustrations draw you in and make you feel like you’re exploring the neighborhood on your own. If I feel homesick for Tokyo, I can always browse through Chavouet’s book and return anytime I want to. ~Ernie Hoyt

Shopping by Gavin Kramer (Fourth Estate)

Gavin Kramer is a British writer who was born in London, graduated from Cambridge University. Shopping is his first novel. In 1998, it was the last book to win the David Higham Prize, a literary prize which was established in 1975 and named after a literary agent. The prize was awarded to citizens of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, Pakistan, or South Africa for a first novel or book of short stories. It was canceled in 1999 due to "the lack of publicity its winners received."

Kramer set his story in the heart of Japan. The metropolis that’s called Tokyo in the mid to late nineties. The bubble has already burst but there are still three types of foreigners you can find in the country or so we are told by the narrator of the story who isn’t even the main character. That falls on Alistair Meadowlark, a British lawyer in his thirties who has accepted a two-year assignment in Japan with his firm. The narrator is Meadowlark’s colleague in the same office. 

Meadowlark’s colleague breaks down the category of young professional expatriates working in Tokyo. He does not include the other expats such as English conversation school teachers or students. He also discludes “the shaven-headed failures who fancied themselves to be Buddhists.” He also does not include the most-despised group of expats, “the slight dark-skinned men who worked on building sites and lived maybe a dozen to a room in the back streets of Shinjuku.”

Of the three categories of professional expatriates, Meadowlark’s colleague believes that Meadowlark belongs to the first group. The kind of person who is in the country not because they want to be but because their company sent them here. The type of person who constantly suffers from culture shock and longs to go home. 

The second type are the graduates of the first. Although they still feel out of place, many of the white men in suits take solace in dating or hooking up with local girls who find foreigners fascinating. They can usually be found wandering the night clubs and bars in Roppongi. 

Then there is the third, to which the narrator considers himself to be. The kind of expat who avoids places that most gaijin, the catch-all term for all foreigners, hang out. The kind of expat whom the narrator says, “We knew our tanzen from our yukata, Our Dazai from our Mishima, our udon from our soba.” So the narrator wasn’t surprised by Meadowlark’s assessment of living and working in Tokyo when he says, “There’s nothing to do here apart from work. Is there?”

But then we follow Meadowlark’s downward spiral as he meets Sachiko. A precocious sixteen-year old high school girl who’s very much into the latest fashions and brand names. Meadowlark becomes obsessed with her and boasts to the narrator that she is his girlfriend and he is more than happy to spend his hard-earned money on whatever she wants. He is in denial of the fact that is just another middle-aged man taking part in a social phenomena of the nineties called enjo-kosai which translates to “compensating dating”. 

Kramer brings to life the excesses of living in Tokyo in the mid to late nineties as seen through the eyes of someone who has actually lived there. He focuses a lot on what was happening during that nineties - the “subsidized dating” problem with minors, the tamagotchi fad which was a hand-held digital pet. Although the city and its environs are well-described, his characters are not flushed out quite so well. They remain two-dimensional which makes it hard for the reader to care about any of them. Still, if you plan on living and working in Japan, this story could provide you with some insight as to what to expect. ~Ernie Hoyt

My Falling Down House by Jayne Joso (Seren Books)

My Falling Down House is Jayne Joso’s third novel and the first one set in Japan. The book won the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Award whose aim is to “promote understanding and cooperation between the U.K. and Japan” in a variety of fields, including literature. 

Takeo Tanaka is a young man in his twenties who narrates the entire story. A year ago, he had everything a man could want. He was young and ambitious, and had a good job with a great salary.  He had a beautiful girlfriend he lived with in one of Tokyo’s more upscale neighborhoods. He seemed set for life. 

A year ago when he was out drinking with co-workers, he got so drunk that when he woke up, he found himself in an abandoned and dilapidated house. It seems he had also bought a cello before finding his way to this dwelling. 

It was sometime after his twenty-fifth birthday when a financial crisis occurred. Takeo lost his job, his girlfriend, and his home. For a while Takeo managed to sleep at the office creating a small nest under his desk with just a box and a blanket. His co-worker Shizuko nicknamed him the Box Man. But once he lost his job, he could no longer sleep at the office. 

After becoming jobless and homeless, Takeo decided to seek out the old house where he once spent the night in a drunken stupor. He was drawn to the place. He felt there was “a feel for nature here, a sense of a slow and simple way of living. A forgotten way of living.” He told himself it was only temporary. Once he recovered, he would move on. 

So begins Takeo’s new life of disappearing from society. He isolated himself by taking residence in an old house located on the grounds of a temple. He encounters a cat, finds his cello, and slowly settles into the life of a hermit. His supposed temporary stay extended to one season and then another. 

The longer Takeo stays at the house, he believes he sees or is being haunted by a yokai, a spirit or shapeshifter. As the summer turns to autumn and autumn turns to winter, Takeo seems to drift further and further away from the reality of life. It is becoming harder and harder for Takeo to determine what is real and what is fantasy. He thinks he may be slowly going crazy. In order to keep his sanity, he works on a number of projects just to keep his mind busy but still, he does not know if he is on his way to recovery. 

As Takeo had no room in a home to hide himself away in, he installed himself in a fragile wood and paper house. This phenomenon of hiding oneself away from people and society has become a very big problem in Japan. A new term was given to this phenomenon. It is called hikikomori in Japanese. It translates to “social withdrawal” in English. It can be described as a mild form of depression. 

Takeo’s story can be the story of any salaryman in Japan. Joso makes Takeo out to be an anti-hero. A man you hope will come out of his loneliness and self-pity to become a productive member of society once again. Anybody who has had a setback in life can relate to Takeo, however I believe there is no shame in asking for help. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma (Penguin Press)

“I never thought I could be Japanese, nor did I wish to be.” Ian Buruma, half Dutch, half English, has spent his life in Amsterdam and London, while feeling an outsider in both places. This, the man who becomes his friend and mentor when Buruma arrives in Tokyo to study film, is an asset. In Japan, Donald Ritchie tells him, a foreigner will always be a gaijin, “an outside person,” giving a  “freedom that is better than belonging.” In Japan, Ritchie says, “You can make yourself into anything you want to be.”

Tokyo dazzles the twenty-three-year-old Buruma with its visual density and its propensity for change. The city he enters has been rebuilt over and over again, starting with the Western modernization during the Meiji era, then after the earthquake of 1923, and following the destruction of American bombs in 1945. Now in the mid-70s, the city still holds the changes that came with the economic boom of the 1960s. A coffeehouse called Versailles is a faithful replica of an 18th-century French drawing room, filled with people smoking cigarettes and reading comic books. Old wooden houses and the cries of street vendors carry traces of the past. 

Within this “plastic-fantastic” city is an avant-garde culture that rivals any other of its time. A subculture of Tokyo artists were out to erase all externally-imposed ideas of proper behavior with creative work that is steeped in “the seedy, the obscene, the debauched, the bloody.” Araki, with his daring photographs, Mishima before he disembowled himself with a samurai sword, and the masters of Butoh made art that they called “dorukusai” or “stinking ot the earth.” Their work is shocking and invigorating and Buruma has credentials that allow him entrance to their world. He’s John Schlesinger’s nephew who came to town not long after his uncle’s tour de force, Midnight Cowboy, and Buruma himself is a passionate explorer of Japanese cinema, from yakuza gangster dramas to samurai epics to the gritty skin-flicks known as roman porno.

This leads him to an introduction to Kurosawa, the perfectionist and genius who once had a medieval castle built for a film at great expense, only to have it torn down and rebuilt because nails had been used in the original construction. Shortly before Buruma met him, Kurosawa had tried to kill himself with a razor because funding for his films had dried up, saying that apart from his movies, he didn’t exist.

But Butoh is what claims most of Buruma’s attention, the art of dance that’s based upon ancient Japanese theater and is translated in forms that are “erotic, grotesque, absurd,” with eerie and sometimes terrifying beauty. His encounter with the founder of Butoh ends when Hijikata dismisses him with  “You’re a television.” His next introduction results in his brief Butoh performance in which he disgraces himself by dropping one of the dancers. “So, Buruma,” a performer  observes, “you still believe in words.”

From there he ventures into the Situation Theater of Kara Juro, whose art is “as though Kabuki had been reinvented in a completely modern fashion,” a form of theater that’s political, improvisational, and wildly original. Buruma becomes the resident gaijin, with his interest in art and film--and in Kara, who fosters a form of gang culture that’s rough and sometimes violent.  When a domestic altercation between Kara and his wife flares into the woman’s head nearly being smashed in with a hurled ashtray of gigantic proportions, Buruma intervenes. “So you are just an ordinary gaijin after all,” Kara tells him afterward.

And Buruma admits he is, “hovering around the edges of an exclusive world, content to remain a stranger.” As an outsider, he observes, he takes notes, and he leaves for London where he will write his first book. It is, of course, about Japan. 

“Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet,” he concludes, “Japan was the making of me.” How his romance with Tokyo led to his career as a writer is a story that he tells with honesty and insight. It’s one that should be read by any aspiring expatriate, whether they follow Buruma to Tokyo or go off to explore their own romance.~Janet Brown

Mistress Oriku : Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Matsutaro Kawaguchi (Tuttle)

Originally published as Shigurejaya Oriku in Japanese in 1969 and available for the first time in English, Mistress Oriku : Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Matsutaro Kawaguchi and translated by Royall Tyler focuses on the life of the owner of the famous Shigure Teachouse, Mistress Oriku. It is set in the early Showa era, sometime around the 1920s. 

Oriku, who is now in her sixties, grew up in the Asakusa area and is currently talking to another native of Akasuka, Shinkichi, who is in his late twenties, about life in the area during the Meiji period, some forty years ago. Oriku’s Shigure Teahouse which also served as an inn was built along the river in Mukojima, an isolated area on the outskirts of town. The place looked like a farmhouse and contained eight tatami floored rooms. The house specialty was chazuke, green tea over rice, served with clams brought in from Kuwana on the Ise coast. 

Oriku was telling him, “you could drop a line in the river from the garden of my place and catch a sea bass”. She was telling Shinkichi that people jumped in the river from the jetty in the summer, they didn’t swim but just cooled off in it which proves how clean the river was. They were both lamenting on how Tokyo changed over the years and how the Sumida River has become so dirty. 

Oriku was also telling Shikichi, “People nowadays don’t even know what good food is anymore. They have sake with some tuna sashimi, then some shrimp tempura with their rice, and they think they’ve eaten well.” She goes on to tell Shinkichi that people can’t eat sashimi or tempura three days in a row but at the Shigure Teahouse “you can eat clam chazuke three-hundred and sixty-six days of the year and never get tired of it.”

As the two continue to talk, Oriku tells Shinkichi that before she started her restaurant, she worked in the Yoshiwara District, the pleasure quarters which was created by the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 17th century. She was sold to a brothel called the Silver Flower at the age of eighteen. She tells Shinkichi that she was on her way to becoming a courtesan but became the mistress of the owner, and then worked there herself, not as a prostitute but as brothel madam after the owner died. 

At the age of forty, Oriku leaves the Silver Flower to her adopted daughter, Oito and her husband and opens the teahouse. Everybody around her said it was a bad idea but she was adamant about following her own dream. 

Kawaguchi brings to life the Tokyo of bygone days featuring geishas and artisans, actors and musicians performing a certain style of theater such as kabuki and noh. He blends real life historical figures and locations along with the creations of his own imagination. He portrays Oriku as a feminist before her time. She’s strong and passionate, does what she thinks is right and has no shame in taking on a number of lovers but refuses to settle down with any one of them. 

Although Kawaguchi’s Oriku wasn’t born in Edo, she epitomizes the spirit of the true Edokko, a person born and raised in Edo, the former name of Tokyo. Timeslip into the past and enjoy the journey. ~Ernie Hoyt

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri {Riverhead Books)

Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, originally published in Japanese in 2014 as JR 東京上野駅公園口 (JR Tokyo Ueno Eki Kouen Guchi) is set in modern Japan. It was published in English in 2020 by Morgan Giles and won the National Book Award for Translated Literature for that year as well. 

Kazu is dead, but it is through his eyes that we see the everyday comings and goings of people who live in or visit Ueno Park, one of Tokyo’s most popular public parks that houses many museums, shrines, and a zoological garden. As Kazu describes what he sees, he also talks about his own life and how he came to be homeless and living in the park. 

Kazu is philosophical from the beginning as he relates his story. “I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”

Kazu was born in 1933 in Soma in Fukushima Prefecture. He is married to Setsuko and has a son and a daughter. In order to support his family, Kazu becomes a migrant laborer and goes to Tokyo to help with construction before the coming Summer Olympics which are to be held in Japan for the first time. 

After the Olympics, Kazu is sent to Sendai and continues to work as a migrant laborer to help pay for Koichi’s university tuition as he is studying to become a radiologist. His daughter got married and currently lives in Sendai as well. Kouichi had just passed his radiology exam but a few days later, Kazu receives a call from his wife informing him that their son has died. 

Tragedy seems to follow Kazu even after he returns to his hometown. Setsuko passes away at the age of sixty-five. His granddaughter Mari worries about him and suggests that Kazu come live with her but Kazu thinks it’s improper to live with a twenty-one year old woman and heads back to Tokyo. He leaves a note telling Mari not to come looking for him. 

The last station on the train line that Kazu takes ends at Ueno Station. This is where he has come to die but as he becomes one of the many homeless living in a tent village in Ueno Park and before he knows it, he has been living there for over five years. 

Tragedy strikes again when Kazu hears of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake which causes a tsunami that wiped out many towns along the coast of Northern Japan. One of the victims of the tsunami is his granddaughter Mari and her pet dog.After the sudden death of his only friend in Ueno Park, Kazu falls into despair and makes a grand decision that may shock the reader. 

Yu Miri writes about the harsh reality of the underside of Tokyo. She shows us what the government of Japan does not want to acknowledge. The invisible people, the marginalized, the homeless. She reminds us through the voice of Kazu that most homeless people do not choose to be homeless. We hear the voice of another homeless person saying, “I can’t believe I became homeless...Having passersby look at me like I’m something dirty…” We may feel the pain and agony of Kazu and wonder what direction we would have taken? ~Ernie Hoyt

Getting Genki in Japan : The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Family in Tokyo by Karen Pond (Tuttle)

Karen Pond and her family, which includes a husband and three sons, pack their belongings for an impending move because the father has accepted a new position in his company. However, the family is not moving across town or to another state. No, they are moving to one of the world’s largest cities located in a foreign country. They are moving to Tokyo, Japan. A city as different as night and day compared to their coastal hometown in Maine

Pond may sound a bit flustered and out of her element in her delightful book Getting Genki in Japan, a collection of articles which were previously published in INTOUCH, a monthly magazine of the Tokyo American Club, and also published in Tokyo Families Magazine. The stories are full of humor and include beautiful illustrations by Akiko Saito.

Pond is baffled by the high-tech washlets she finds in the bathroom of a department store. She learns to leave her inhibitions at the door when she has her first hot spring experience. She waltzes out of a bathroom still wearing the toilet slippers. She uses gestures at a pharmacy to get medicine for a stomach ache for her husband and feels triumphant when the pharmacist says, “Wakarimashita” (I understand). However, she didn’t bring her husband home antacid medicine. She bought her husband a pregnancy test!

At a company dinner, Pond mistakes edamame (green soybeans) for a peapod and eats the whole pod instead of squeezing out the beans. One of her husband’s colleagues says to her, “We are curious about something. In Japan, we squeeze the edamame bean into the mouth like this. We would never eat the whole bean. It is very fascinating that in your culture you eat the whole bean.” In order to spare herself from embarrassment, she responds by saying, “This is exactly how I eat edamame in my area of the States. It’s tradition, really. It is good for the character. Mmmmmmm….” 

Of course the biggest difficulty she must overcome is the language barrier. Some of her language follies include introducing her husband as her shuujin which translates to “prisoner”, the proper word being shujin. Or telling a Japanese mother that her child is kowai (scary) instead of kawaii (cute). She doesn’t realize that irashaimasse means “welcome” and not “please take off your shoes''. The language barrier rears its ugly head again when Pond orders cocoa using the English pronunciation of “koko” which means “here” instead of “ko-ko-aah” as it’s pronounced in Japanese.

As an expat living in Japan myself, I can relate to many of the situations Pond finds herself in. I once ate soramame (broad bean), skin and all before my friend told me I am supposed to squeeze out the bean inside. Many of her stories made me laugh out loud.  Some of her anecdotes may be exaggerated for maximum humorous effect and at times her lack of common sense borders on the unbelievable. However, the book is light-hearted and easy to read and is an entertaining romp that will appeal to foreign residents and first-time visitors to Japan alike. ようこうそ日本へ！Welcome to Japan! ~Ernie Hoyt

Tabloid Tokyo : 101 Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan's Wild Weeklies compiled by Mark Schreiber (Kodansha International)

I’m a long time resident of Japan. I have been living in Japan for over twenty years. When I first moved here, I had the same image as most people do about Japan. It’s a safe country. I can leave my wallet or bag on the train and nobody will steal it. People are very kind and helpful. Women can walk the streets alone at night without fear of being molested or raped. Drunk salarymen do not need to fear having their wallets stolen and so on. Most of this still holds true today. 

When I first moved to Japan in January of 1995, three days later, one of the largest earthquakes hit Kobe and over five thousand lives were lost. Only three months later, there was the sarin gas subway attack on a line I frequently used, committed by a doomsday cult which called themselves the Aum Shinri Kyo. So much for my image of Japan being a safe country.

As with most countries, even Japan has its seedier side. There is the Yakuza, the Japanese version of the Mafia which are involved in organized crime. The host and hostess clubs, known as mizu shobai in Japanese which are usually run by the Yakuza as a legitimate business. There are places called Pink Salons where men can go and legally pay for oral sex. There are image clubs which have rooms set up to fulfill clients fantasies such as being groped by a woman on a train or the room will have an office setting and the client can play boss and secretary. There are also health clubs and soap lands where a woman will bathe you and provide some type of sexual service for a small fee. 

This book is a collection of articles that were selected from a variety of Japan’s weekly publications by three reporters - Geoff Botting, Ryan Connell, and Michael Hoffman and compiled into this one book by Mark Schreiber. The original articles were translated into English with the reporters own interpretation of the stories. The articles appeared in the “Tokyo Confidential” column of the Japan Times and the “Waiwai” section of the Mainichi Daily News online site. The articles were taken from many different tabloids which are similar to the National Enquirer and World Wide News but do not include stories about alien abductions or coming back from the dead.  

The publications have such titles as Friday, Shukan Jitsuwa, Shukan Post, and Flash, just to name a few. The articles have such colorful titles as “Parasite Couples Drain Parents Dry”, “Panty-Gazing Research Revealed” or one of my favorites, “Ugly Women Draw Men Like Flies”. They’re a collection of articles where the cliche, “truth is stranger than fiction” may be applicable. These stories give you a glimpse into a part of contemporary Japan that the Japanese probably do not want you to know about. However, as to the actual facts of the story, well, as with most tabloid publications, the stories are highly embellished and is best to read them with a grain of salt. Keeping that in mind, the stories are funny and entertaining and may get you to thinking what exactly is the “real” Japan. ~Ernie Hoyt

Pretty Good Number One : An American Family Eats Tokyo by Matthew Amster-Burton (Viaduct Music)

I never get tired of reading about other people's experiences in my adopted homeland of Japan so this month,  I chose something close to my heart. It’s a  story about traveling, food, and Japan by an author who happens to live in my hometown of Seattle! I didn't realize this was Amster-Burton's second book after Hungry Monkey : A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater, which I have yet to read but I must say, this is one entertaining romp through one of the world's best gastronomic capitals, Tokyo.

The book I chose to review may have a strange title to Americans maybe, but if you have ever been to Nakano, where Amster-Burton's family stayed for a month while experiencing the culinary life of Tokyo, it would not surprise you. Japan is full of English signs that don't seem to make any sense to native speakers. Amster-Burton covers what every novice or first time visitor should check out--ramen, sushi, okonomiyaki ( a Japanese style of pancake which is savory, not sweet) and of course takoyaki (octopus balls which are a staple in Osaka). All of this he accomplishes with his 8-year- old daughter in tow (and a wife who actually suggests living in Tokyo for a short spell).

You will be captivated not only by him and his daughter satisfying their palates, but also finding joy in the way they find everything about Japan fascinating--riding on the bullet train, browsing the depa-chika (the food section in the basement of department stores), the convenience stores, and other everyday things most expats take for granted.

It reminded me of all my solitary food excursions I used to take when I first moved here, but as the author only spent a short time here, he missed out on a variety of food festivals that are held almost weekly throughout the summer at Yoyogi Park. Still, even a long time resident of Japan will be able to “gobble” up this food and travel memoir.

The Earthquake Bird by Susanna Jones (Picador)

“Early this morning, several hours before my arrest, I was woken by an earth tremor.  I mention the incident not to suggest that there was a connection – that somehow the fault lines in my life came crashing together in the form of a couple of policemen – for in Tokyo we have a quake like this every month.  I am simply relating the sequences of events as it happened.  It has been an unusual day and I would hate to forget anything…”

What a great opening for the story told by Lucy Fly – an Englishwoman from Yorkshire who currently works as a translator in Tokyo and has just been arrested in connection with the disappearance of another British woman – Lily Bridges.  The police have discovered a torso in Tokyo Bay believed to be part of the remains of Lily Bridges and the last person to be seen with the dead woman was none other than Lucy Fly.  There was an altercation between the two as well, according to a witness.

Although a friend of Lucy’s tells her to act normal when being questioned by the police, she is not all that cooperative, as she does not want to implicate her friend and lover Teiji.  The mystery takes on a whole new life as the police continue to question Lucy. Slowly she divulges to us, the readers, why she left her home and family in the first place.  How she became friends with Lily.  And then with Teiji.  And how their three lives intertwined.

What brought Lily together with Lucy was the fact that they were from the same area in England—although Lucy wasn’t really thrilled with hanging out with someone from her old neighborhood, as she moved to Tokyo to get as far away as she could from her roots. Still, Lucy couldn’t help but like Lily, who had a friendly and positive attitude towards life.

Lucy seems resigned to the fact that she’s guilty of something. She may not be directly implicated in Lily’s death and mutilation, but somehow she feels responsible for it.  Could the usually reserved Lucy really be a killer in disguise?  Why is she being so uncooperative with the police?  Does she really have something to hide?  Or does she just not care what is going to happen to her?  The outcome may surprise you and might make you rethink your position on the power of love.

This debut novel set entirely in Japan is the kind of story that stays with you long after you have finished reading the book.  At first, I was undecided in featuring this title or not, but after much thought, and seeing how the story stayed with me for a while, it was clear to me that other people will enjoy it as well.  by Ernie Hoyt

マイ・アイズ・トウキョウ [My Eyes Tokyo] by 徳橋 功 (Isao Tokuhashi) 「幻冬舎 ルネッサンス」 (Gentosha Renaissance)

As an expat who has lived in my adopted city of Tokyo for the past fifteen years, I am always fascinated by other people's perception of Japan-- Tokyo in particular.  Apparently, Tokuhashi shares my interest and decided to explore this topic through the stories of the people who were willing to talk to him.

In the prologue, Tokuhashi mentions that he had lived in a small town in California for a short time and realized how much of Japanese culture had already penetrated America - Hondas and Toyotas running along the freeway, Panasonic or Sony stereos in people's homes, kids playing video games on Nintendo, the popularity of anime such as Pokemon, Sailor Moon and Dragonball.

But then his roommate would ask him questions like, "Do you speak Chinese?", "What color are the signal lights in Japan", "Are there really more bicycles than there are cars?"  Tokuhashi thought if these questions cropped up in a state like California with a large second generation Japanese population and a lot of Asian exchange students, then probably this indicated that  the majority of Americans really know nothing about his home country.

My Eyes Tokyo

With his experience in America, Tokuhashi decided it would be a great idea to let Americans and other foreigners know what the "Now" of Japan is like.  But introducing Japan from a Japanese perspective would probably not attract anybody's notice.  This is where Tokuhashi had his epiphany.  Why not have foreigners living in Tokyo tell their own stories?  Why did they choose to live in Tokyo and how do they perceive the city?

Tokuhashi then set up a website called "My Eyes Tokyo" in which he interviewed foreigners living in Tokyo and then spread the stories around the world in English.  This book is a small compilation of some of those interviews.  The book shares the stories of people from countries such as Senegal, Turkey, Bolivia, Israel, France, Algeria, as well as the United States.

Their stories are vast and varied.  There is the Algerian who owns and runs a Japanese soba shop.  A Frenchman who owns and runs a Japanese specialty tea shop.  A Turkish man who performs rakugo. A Brit who sets up an International Theatre Troupe.  An American who launches the first Food Bank in Japan.  Also featured are musicians and singer-songwriters.

Tokuhashi's idea is to show the "now" of Tokyo as seen by the expat community, believing that they probably see things that the normal Japanese either takes for granted or has just plain forgotten about.  The interviewees all seem to share the opinion that the younger generation of Japanese don't know how great their country is.

As  one of the many who have  decided to live here, I can tell you there is more to Tokyo than just karaoke, anime, or electronics!  Trust me, and if you ever make it to Tokyo, I will gladly be your unofficial guide.~by Ernie Hoyt

Tokyo Vice : An American Reporter On The Police Beat In Japan by Jake Adelstein (Pantheon Books)

“Either erase the story, or we’ll erase you.  And maybe your family.  But we’ll do them first, so you learn your lesson before you die.”  An ominous beginning to a true story told by an American reporter who worked the crime beat for one of Japan’s best known newspapers – the Yomiuri Shinbun (the Japanese paper, not  its English- language equivalent) which has a circulation of more than ten million a day.

The man who threatened him was a yakuza enforcer whose boss was Tadamasa Goto – a leader of the notorious yakuza gang, the Goto Gumi--and the subject of a story Adelstein was working on.  The yakuza boss had gotten a liver transplant at the Dumont-UCLA Liver Cancer Center for which Goto allegedly spent nearly a million US dollars. Some say the amount was actually three million and that some of the money was sent from Japan to the US through a casino in Las Vegas.

Tokyo Vice

What made this a scoop to Adelstein was the question of how the man was able to get into the States.  He was on the watch list of U.S. Customs and Immigration, the FBI, and the DEA.  He was blacklisted – he should not have been able to set foot in the country.  And how did he become a priority for a liver transplant?

However given an ultimatum by Goto’s enforcer, Adelstein chose the path most of us would probably have also taken – he did not report the story.  Unfortunately, this decision would come back to haunt him.

There are a lot of books about Japan’s mafia – the yakuza, written by former yakuza members and people who have infiltrated the various gangs, including Yakuza Moon, written by the daughter of a former yakuza boss.  But Adelstein’s book isn’t just about the yakuza – it’s about the underside of Tokyo, in which the yakuza play a big part.  It’s about the Tokyo you won’t read about in any guide books.  It’s about the seamier side of life in one of the world’s biggest metropolis.

Adelstein takes us on his journey from becoming a student at Sophia (Joichi) University, to extending his studies of the Japanese language, to taking the “entrance exam” for the Yomiuri Shinbun, which is “kind of a newspaper SAT”. “If your score is high enough, you get an interview, and then another, and then another.  If you do well enough in your interviews, and if your interviewers like you, then you might get a job promise.”  Not only did Adelstein do well and pass all his interviews, apparently his interviewers liked him and told him to report for duty the following month or so.

As a cub reporter, Adelstein is first sent to Saitama Prefecture which people jokingly refer to as the New Jersey of Japan.  As he works closely with the police, he gets his feet wet by working on stories such as a juvenile using a bestselling book titled “The Perfect Manual of Suicide” for its intended purpose, a murder case of a snack-mama in Chichibu, and another murder case by a dog breeder in Saitama.  Finally, Adelstein gets transferred back to Tokyo, to Shinjuku Ward’s Kabukicho District – the Red Light Area of Tokyo where he is to work with the Tokyo Police Vice Squad.

The cases he writes about while working in Shinjuku make his Saitama stories seem mild in comparison.  One of his biggest news pieces was the Lucy Blackman story, a foreign woman who was raped and dismembered with her body parts hidden in a cave. He also wrote about the ATM thefts where the criminals would use a truck and a jackhammer and take out the entire machine in just a few minutes.  But when Adelstein uncovers the story of the nearly impotent Japanese government not doing anything about human trafficking, the book really picks up steam and reads like a non-stop thriller.

Although Japan is still safer than most countries in my opinion, it is not totally devoid of violence and crime.  And one cannot really tell the difference between a yakuza and a hard-working salaryman as the yakuza also have their hand in a lot of legitimate businesses.  It still amazes me that the yakuza can have their own businesses when the police know they’re guilty of racketeering, loan-sharking, human-trafficking, extortion and other crimes.  But still I love living in my adopted country.--Review written by Ernie Hoyt

Tokyo: City on the Edge by Todd Crowell and Stephanie Forman Morimura (Asia2000)

Ernie Hoyt, Tokyo resident, unearths a different sort of guidebook that illuminates his hometown.

I can't help but love Tokyo, as it's been my adoptive city for almost fifteen years now. But to have visitors appreciate what some people have described as an urban metropolis, concrete jungle, city that never sleeps, city of contrasts or safest city in the world and a number of other cliches, it's nice to find two authors who share my special love for this city. They are Todd Crowell and Stephanie Forman Morimura. Crowell lived in Tokyo during the '50s and returned as a military intelligence officer in the '60s. He currently resides in Hong Kong where he writes for Asiaweek. Morimura moved to Tokyo in 1980 to work for the International Education Center on a two year contract. She met and married a Japanese national and made Tokyo her home.

I should point out that this is not a guide book to Tokyo. It does not have a listing of what's the best place to eat or where the cheapest place to stay can be found. It's about the city as a whole. The authors describe Tokyo as a "collection of villages" where each neighborhood has its own character and charm. It's a city in which twenty private railway lines and a dozen or so subway lines transports its million- plus dwellers to and from work everyday. A city in which the world's 500 largest companies are found,100 of which have their head offices here.

If you came to Tokyo as a first- time visitor, you would most likely land at Narita International Airport, located forty-five minutes outside the city by train. Once leaving the terminal, you would be surprised to see miles of rice fields and farmland, not the sprawling city of concrete you might have imagined. Once you board the train headed into town, the first major site you will see would be Tokyo Disneyland - however, you will still not be in Tokyo proper as Tokyo Disneyland is located in Chiba Prefecture.

You might also be surprised to find that in 1943, Tokyo was abolished as a city. It has become Tokyo-To which includes outlying suburbs and a few islands off the coast.

Tokyo Proper consists of 23 wards that each have a character all of their own. A few are introduced in this book to give an idea of the diversity of the city. In Arakawa Ward, you will find the last remaining Ding-Dong Trolley. It runs from Minowabashi to Waseda. In Sumida Ward, just north of the Ryogokukan (the building where sumo bouts take place), is a monument dedicated to those lives lost in the Great Kanto Earthquake and Fire of 1923 and to the victims of American firebombing in 1945 during World War II. (Although the book does not mention where this is, I went searching on my own and discovered it to be in a place called Yokoamicho Park.)

To get a glimpse of Tokyo's X Generation, all you have to do is head to Harajuku and Shibuya in Shibuya Ward. Not only will you find the latest in teen fashion, but you will find a host of gourmet restaurants as well. In Shinjuku Ward, you will come across Hyakunincho-- which plays home to Russian hookers and the Yakuza at night while by day it's a bustling Korea Town.

You are also introduced to some other neighborhoods that have their own claim to fame. Den-En Chofu is one such place, considered the Beverly Hills of Tokyo. Another is Yanaka-- where the residents fought to preserve old neighborhoods and buildings, and now use them as ateliers and boutiques. There is the Odaiba District -- Tokyo's waterfront city which could be compared to New York's Coney Island.

For anybody with an interest in Tokyo, this will be a delightful trip through an amazing place. I'm still finding new places to explore and new things to experience-- even after spending fifteen years in the middle of this wonderful city.

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace (Knopf)

It is the world after the Apocalypse, bombed, burned-out and ravenous. People starve while lice feast on their skin and in their hair. Lured by the promise of food, young women follow men they have never seen before, and little boys play at being soldiers, joined by little girls who play at being streetwalkers. The smell of death is well known; it's the stench of rotten apricots. Nothing makes sense and no one is who they appear to be. The Victors are the only people who are not locked in a nightmare, and criminals are the rulers of the marketplace. The war is over and this is Tokyo in 1946.

In this broken city, corpses are not unusual and people are haunted by death. Black scorched concrete and the charred remnants of houses stand as memorials to the thousands of people who died in barrages of firebombs, while the noise of jackhammers working to rebuild what was destroyed punctuates every other activity. For Detective Minami, a Tokyo policeman, the dead from the past are so real to him that only sedatives will allow him to sleep. He’s a man whose life is almost robotic. He works, he brings food to his family, he makes quick visits to a woman who he says "haunts me."

"I am one of the survivors," he tells himself bitterly and repeatedly, "one of the lucky ones."

The bodies of young women who were raped and strangled are found in a city park, and the police begin the task of discovering their identities and finding their killer. Minami becomes immersed in a hell that is composed of his war memories and of the terrible truths that he is forced to learn by doing his job, and by finding a murderer whose past he shares.

And we join him there. This is not a novel that leaves the reader unmoved and unscathed. Through Minami, we become inhabited by the world that he roams through. His repeated phrases begin to drive us as crazy as his body lice drive him. His hunger becomes ours and we feel the bile that he persistently vomits rising in our own throats.

David Peace uses the cadence of rock and roll and the onomatopoeic language usually associated with comic strips to carry us deeply into this book, along with words that are so piercing that it often feels as though he is writing in a whole new language. His artistry and his storytelling hold us captive in a landscape that we would prefer not to see, and yet his skill makes it impossible for us to turn away.

Once in every couple of decades, just when fiction seems as though it is really and truly dead, along comes a book that turns upside down and inside out everything that we think we know about storytelling. Like On the Road, Catch 22, or All the Pretty Horses, Tokyo Year Zero redefines what a novel can be, and what a novel can do. Read it.