This pedestrian thriller pits a Japanese cop and an American agent for wealthy art collectors against a brutal yakuza executioner as they struggle for a legendary samurai sword. Kay Williams, in Tokyo to purchase the sword of the Emperor Meiji for her client, instead witnesses the murder of the charming old man who owns this rare collectible. The killer is Masao ``Cricket'' Kimura, who has been employed by a top yakuza chief to obtain the sword and use it to remove as many heads as necessary to scare off a group of disgruntled investors suing to recover billions of yen from a sleazy businessman with criminal ties. The case is assigned to Detective Inspector Takeo Saji, who happens to be a boyhood friend of Hideki Kohno, the man behind the investment scam. Because Saji is burakumin (a member of the Japanese social class equivalent to India's untouchables) and kikokushigo (someone so changed by residence in a foreign country—America in his case- -that the Japanese no longer accept him), he is neither respected nor liked by his peers, rendering his assignment almost impossible. He has been deliberately chosen for just that reason by a higher-up who is involved in the mass-murder effort. Blankenship (Brotherly Love, not reviewed, etc.) has written the sort of story in which unlikely relationships abound well beyond the point of credulity, characters are extraordinarily open with one another within minutes of meeting (especially in matters sexual), and fast-paced, often bloody action is expected to mask improbable coincidence. Even the inside look at Japanese life (Blankenship lived for five years in Tokyo) proves to be superficial at best. Disappointing. The open door for a sequel seems overly optimistic. (First printing of 30,000)
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-430-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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