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TOKYO
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.
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.
295 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 6, 2018
64 people want to read
About the author
Michael Mejia
6 books24 followersMichael Mejia is the author of the novels TOKYO and Forgetfulness, and his writing has been published in many journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, he is editor in chief of Western Humanities Review, co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, and a professor of creative writing at the University of Utah.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 6, 2022
Michael Mejia’s Tokyo begins with the novelistic character sketch of an obsequious corporate manager. It then transforms, quite swiftly, into something typographically and rhythmically closer to a poem, disorienting and cubist in its effect. If “cubist” also refers to a multicity of perspectives, here we have them in abundance on the subject of Japan… As someone who has been immersed in Japanese culture for most of his adult life, I feel qualifiedly impressed by the level of attention—almost obsessive—that Mejia brings to the subject. The tale is frequently sordid, but punctuated with outbursts of the beautifully strange, and interjections of laughter. This is bold writing in every way.
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October 16, 2018My review is up on The Collagist: http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist...
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May 10, 2021It is embarrassing how little of a grasp I had on this. I have no idea how to read it. The first fifty or so pages are perfectly accessible, and then the novel totally shifts. The genre and tone changed so suddenly I didn't know whether or not we were even in the same story, and then, by the time I realized it was the same story, I already felt as if I had been thrown in the deep end. This is part of the work of the novel, though: There is the play with gender and race and performance and the relationship between all of that, but almost as much a part of this is the reader's experience. Take the focus on pausing, for example -- there is an unrelenting amount of em dashes in this, which creates pauses instead of clean sentences that flow all the way through. There is also the images, which throw a break in the text, and the sentence fragments and the line breaks and the English spellings (?) for Japanese words. Given this isn't a translation and was published in the U.S., I'm assuming that we are meant to make us pause to look them up or suffer through not understanding it. Even the first section plays into this -- the writing itself is distracted, something accomplished through the narrator's voice, forcing us to wait for an explanation for what the "Tuna Affair" is, even though it's introduced in the first sentence.
All of this is very good and interesting work, but I have no idea what to do with it yet. I have a feeling I'll come back to this in a few years and then be like !! oh! But today is not that day.
All of this is very good and interesting work, but I have no idea what to do with it yet. I have a feeling I'll come back to this in a few years and then be like !! oh! But today is not that day.
July 12, 2021
A challenging book, and one that's difficult to categorize, "Tokyo" is divided into three sections which are progressively more poetic/dreamlike/obscure, and organized loosely around a dark, magical realist premise - human bodies begin to appear inside large tuna fish at Japan's most famous fish market.
Considering how many Japanese terms the author leaves untranslated, a basic knowledge of Japanese language (and culture) are almost a prerequisite to following the story, and the obscurity in the final (and longest) section of the book is, at times, a detriment - frankly, by the end, with what felt like constantly changing perspectives and the use of single letter character names, I was a bit lost. Still, I'm a fan of experimental fiction, and the juxtaposition of line/page breaks and random photos/drawings made for an interesting reading experience, albeit one which, in the end, didn't provide much in the way of narrative closure.
Considering how many Japanese terms the author leaves untranslated, a basic knowledge of Japanese language (and culture) are almost a prerequisite to following the story, and the obscurity in the final (and longest) section of the book is, at times, a detriment - frankly, by the end, with what felt like constantly changing perspectives and the use of single letter character names, I was a bit lost. Still, I'm a fan of experimental fiction, and the juxtaposition of line/page breaks and random photos/drawings made for an interesting reading experience, albeit one which, in the end, didn't provide much in the way of narrative closure.
August 4, 2022
I really wanted to enjoy this because the premise was so delightfully bizarre. And I did find the first section fascinating. Unfortunately, after that section the book moved into the territory of “I don’t have the slightest idea what’s happening anymore”. I’m not a fan of what my mom and I like to call ‘gimmicky’ books, where it seems like the author is working way too hard to seem avant-garde and not nearly hard enough to make the book accessible to the reader. That was definitely the vibe I got here. It’s entirely possible that I just wasn’t putting enough thought into the book, since I read it while on vacation, but to be honest I just don’t understand how the majority of the book provided enough information to create a coherent narrative. So, unfortunately this one wasn’t my thing, but I’m giving it three stars because I recognize that this is likely more a matter of personal preference than necessarily a problem with the book itself.
January 17, 2021
Sorry but I have to say it's a total waste of time. The first part has lured me into reading the book. Unfortunately the rest of the book never explained the event that has occured in the first part. I really don't understand much what tale the author had wanted to tell. Why does the author keep using the English version of the Japanese words without writing the meaning there as well? How are the readers supposed to understand those English version of Japanese terms? The authors seem to try to put everything foreigners had heard about Japan into the story and therefore the fish market, Ueno Station, tsunami, annihilation, so on and so forth,without any logical correlations between these things in the story.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews