Tokyo Suckerpunch by Isaac Adamson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
So it turns out Tokyo Suckerpunch is out of print, but I was lucky enough to find a copy in a used bookstore. Reading books made out of paper and ink is weird, but I managed, thanks to Adamson’s engaging style sense of humor. I was a little let down by a meandering plot and not much payoff at the end, but if books are for getting lost in on a rainy day, you could do worse than this one.
I got my copy at a Half Priced Books, one I’d never been to and visited on a whim. Didn’t find it in the sci-fi aisle (which was appropriate as TSP’s not sci-fi). Didn’t find it in the mystery aisle (which threw me, since this is clearly a take on the traditional detective story). It was in the mainstream fiction section… but that is where they stow magic realism, right? Looks like I should have taken that as a bit of forewarning.
Because on the one hand a mash-up of genres seems like it would be a lot of fun. A journalist in Japan covering a martial-arts competition for a teen rag published in Ohio, on the trail of a mystery woman, pursued by the Yakuza and a secretive religious organization, and all of it wrapped around a dead B-movie director. Oops, that sentence had no verb. And TSP had no point, either, I’m afraid. The genre-mash suffered from a lack of cohesiveness.
Which is not to say it wasn’t fun to read, but only as a gaijin tourist in Adamson’s version of Japan. Some fun action scenes, some witty dialogue, some good moments straight out of your favorite noir library… but that’s about it.
The back-of-the-book blurb calls this a mix of The Big Sleep and Memoirs of Geisha, with some Chinatown thrown in. Can’t say I agree with that. The geisha parts of the novel are incidental, and have little or nothing to do with the plot. It’s an interesting choice for creating a femme fatale, but Adamson’s geisha might as well have been a faerie. And as for the Chandler reference—TSP’s main character, Billy Chaka, isn’t nearly as self-loathing as required for such a comparison.
Go ahead and read the book if you can find a copy. Or I’ll loan you mine. And if you find a copy of the sequels, let me know. It rains a lot in Seattle, so it’s nice to having something to curl up around when my e-reader is recharging.