Tokyo Noir
in and out of Japan's underworld
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé, and memoir.
It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organised crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about — for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy — himself.
And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.
The underworld isn’t what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlours are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Korean Japanese and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming.
In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it’s like when you’re in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Adelstein follows up The Last Yakuza with another illuminating blend of memoir and reportage. For 12 years, Adelstein covered the crime beat at Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, focusing on organized crime. In late 2008, a purge of the top bosses in Japan's largest yakuza group—including Tadamasa Goto, who'd developed a particular grudge against Adelstein—left the reporter feeling adrift. He rebranded as a private eye, investigating yakuza front companies and mob involvement in the largely Korean-run pachinko parlor business. Then, in 2011, Adelstein was drawn back to journalism by the Tōhoku tsunami and subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. His inquiry into the power company's gross negligence pointed to collusion with the yakuza. Threaded throughout the narrative are more personal matters, including Adelstein's descriptions of mourning one of his best friends and dealing with the discovery of a cancerous tumor on his liver. As always, the author's ability to boil down Japan's complex sociopolitical dynamics in sharp, often-humorous prose impresses ("I don't think most of the customers there were seeking spiritual enlightenment," he deadpans about a strip club supposedly founded on Buddhist principles). The account ends in 2017, when he took vows to become a Buddhist priest, and readers will be left hoping he details that experience in his next book. For true crime fans, this is a treat.
