TOKYO
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A novel in three parts, linked by a single narrative of disaster, loss, and longing.
TOKYO is an incisive, shape-shifting tour de force, a genre-bending mix of lyric prose, science fiction, horror, and visual collage exploring the erotic undercurrents of American perceptions of Japanese culture and identity.
By turns noir, surreal, and clinical in its language and style, TOKYO employs metaphors of consumption, disease, theater, gender fluidity, monstrousness, and ecological disaster in intertwined accounts touching on matters of cultural appropriation, fiction’s powerful capacity to produce immersive realities, and the culturally corrupting late capitalist excesses that entangle both the United States and Japan.
The novel opens with a fantastic, slyly comic report written by a Japanese executive, describing the anomalous bluefin tuna his company purchased at Tokyo’s iconic fish market, as well as the dissolution of the executive’s marriage to his Japanese-American, or Sansei, wife. But when an American writer—whose own Sansei wife was previously married to a Japanese executive—begins investigating the report’s author and his claims, assisted by a mysterious Japanese correspondent the American suspects may once have been his wife’s lover, identities begin to scramble until it’s uncertain who is imagining who, and who is and isn’t Japanese. Meanwhile, a secret plot to establish pure Japaneseness through the global distribution of genetically engineered bluefin tuna seems to be rushing toward its conclusion like a great wave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science fiction and erotica are blended in this experimental novel, Mejia's ambitious but bewildering attempt to capture the "whirlpool heart" of Tokyo. Sadohara, an executive at a Japanese fishing conglomerate, is forced to contend with the mysterious appearance of a dead naked woman inside a freshly caught tuna at Tokyo's famed Tsukiji market. Bodies keep appearing in fish, but Sadohara nevertheless orders the fish sold with the bodies still inside them. Rather than exploring the consequences of the scandal he has set in motion, Mejia shifts gears: his prose fragments into impressionistic, seemingly unrelated scenes in which a scientist offers up a test tube full of "the visible form of invisibility," fetuses are bought and sold, and a man called S applies kabuki makeup. Sadohara is reintroduced, this time as a television writer, but is quickly displaced by his boss, M. Glimpses of a love triangle among M, his wife, and S fill out the rest of the novel, interspersed with photographs, illustrations, and quotations from Japanese literature. Mejia's limited attempts to return to motifs such as Tsukiji and an image of "gloves edged with black fur" fail to establish any sort of accessible through line amidst the chaos. The result is a novel that, though audaciously conceived, lacks the rigorous structure that might allow the reader entrance into Mejia's disorganized world.
