Somewhat too cute for comfort, but, still, a good tale with a nice slant on geography and the pop scene.
Danger lurks in the well-lit corners of Tokyo’s immaculately clean streets, and it takes a teen-mag journalist to unravel the mysteries of this inscrutable world.
Billy Chaka is reporter for the Cleveland-based Asian rock magazine Youth in Asia (the sister publication of the e-zine Generasia X), and he knows Japan inside and out, having established a reputation for himself there as “the hard-boiled laureate of the literate teen.” He was even made the subject of an action film (Wildman for Geisha!) in which he rescues a young woman from the clutches of the Tokyo mob. Billy hated the film so much that he assaulted its director, and, as a result, his editor sent him off to Hokkaido on a mandatory “vacation.” He doesn’t get much rest: Shortly after his arrival at the Hotel Kitty (each room complete with its own cat), the night porter dies in his arms—only minutes before Billy’s editor calls to tell him that Yoshi, the lead singer of Japan’s most popular group Saint Arrow, has overdosed in a Tokyo love hotel. The chase is on! Back in Tokyo, Billy looks up his old friend Olga (a Swedish stripper at the Purloined Kitten Club who knew Yoshi) and tries to get the inside story on Yoshi’s final days. He also hooks up with the brass at Seppuku Records (Yoshi’s label), who try to commission him to write a biography of the band. But this turns out to be more than your garden-variety Hendrix-style overdose. For one thing, several of the Seppuku directors have ties to the Tokyo mafia. For another, Billy begins to suspect some connection between Yoshi’s death and that of the night porter in the Hotel Kitty. By the time several more corpses (“popsicles”) are discovered in Hokkaido, Billy knows all is not well. The question is whether he can get to the bottom of things in time.
Somewhat too cute for comfort, but, still, a good tale with a nice slant on geography and the pop scene.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-81292-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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