Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore
-
- $8.99
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
This dreamlike dystopian novel “shines a dark spotlight on the modern allure of pharmaceuticals’ seeming power to assuage all ills” (Booklist).
Set in the very near future, this is the story of a traveling salesman floating from arid Arizona parking lots to steamy Bangkok bars and beyond to peddle the hottest new commodity for a group known only as The Company. What he has is a drug that erases memory. You can choose your oblivion, be it one mistake or a lifetime of pain. But things become hazy when our hero begins sampling the goods and reaches the point where he can’t even remember what it is he cannot remember.
A pitch-perfect piece for our times filled with hypnotic prose, Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore is both a riveting story and a thoughtful exploration of the drug culture that surrounds us, the nature of forgetfulness, and the implacable tyranny of emotions—questioning what it means to be human when everything, including human identity, can be bought.
“Part crime novel, part political allegory, part love story . . . Compelling.” —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A starred or boxed review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred or boxed review.TOKYO DOESN'T LOVE US ANYMORERay Loriga, trans. from the Spanish by John King. Grove, $13 paper (272p) In Spanish writer Loriga's derivative novel, an anonymous narrator travels the world of the near future selling memory-erasing drugs to anyone with recollections they'd rather forget. The callous but despairing narrator peddles "chemical" for the "Company," which sends him around the globe, from Arizona to Bangkok, from Berlin to Tokyo. In each exotic port-of-call the agent makes a sale or two, has anonymous sex and collects memories he himself will one day have to erase. "There's no longer anything that chemical can't hide nor anything that chemical isn't capable of bringing back again," he laments. Occasionally, Loriga conjures up an interesting futuristic nugget (e.g., a computer program that reincarnates the dead), but more often he meanders into generic tangents that could have come from any other dystopian sci-fi novel. Sometimes his hard-boiled prose hits the mark ("Memory is like the most stupid dog, you throw it a stick and it brings you any old thing"), but often he tries too hard for neo-noir hipness ("Tijuana stretches out into the desert like a stain of oil on an ice rink"). The novel feels cobbled together from the work of past sci-fi masters: the cold and indiscriminate sexuality of J.G. Ballard's Crash, the hallucinogenic tone of Burroughs's Naked Lunch, the cyberpunk globe-trotting of William Gibson and the bleak not-too-distant-future of Philip K. Dick. In the end, Loriga's own story barely emerges from the homages to his predecessors.
