The Method Actors
A Novel
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2006 Prize in Modern Letters, THE METHOD ACTORS traces the disappearance of a young, gifted military historian named Michael Edwards from his desk in Tokyo and his sister Meredith's return to the city in search of him. Michael's research into international war crimes trials will take his sister to the dark heart, the centerlessness and moral ambiguity of modern gaijin life in Tokyo, and though four hundred years of history, myth and propaganda, love and infidelity, religious transport and hallucination.
A comic, hugely entertaining and often terrifying novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kiwinovelist Shuker's debut follows a set of gaijin young international 20-somethings who have gravitated to ultrahip, fast-forward Tokyo as one of their number goes missing. A young Wellington-born military historian researching the Rape of Nanking, Michael Edwards suddenly disappears from his coterie, and his ex-pat clan swings into action despite their own problems. Michael's sister Meredith, 22, rushes back from a U.S. trip and must negotiate their complicated family's concern, as well as her own lack of direction. Catherine (married at 24 and having recently ended an affair with Michael), Yasuhiko (a misfit ex-botanist drug dealer to the rich and foreign), New Zealander Simon and his occasional bedmate Jacques all get involved to one degree or another, when they can stop thinking about fashion, sex or drugs. Shuker uses short sections titled by character to shift back and forth in time, place and perspective. Meredith tirelessly roots around her brother's life, but the complex, grandiose scope of Michael's research (which may hold the key) pales in comparison to the Tokyo appearance of Catherine's husband. Shuker's dizzying debut shimmers with authentic detail, an uncanny, otherworldly sense of place and a cast of believably hardcore hipsters.
