In the Miso Soup

20 year old Kenji is a nightlife guide for foreign sex tourists in Tokyo. He encounters Frank, an American looking for a good time in the red light district of Kabuki-cho on the last remaining days of 1996. Something is off about Frank and Kenji is somehow convinced this tourist is the man responsible for a spate of grisly murders in the area.

Far too much time is spent explaining the commercial sex-trade in Kabuki-cho. Meanwhile when Kenji takes a break from obsessing over how he's convinced Frank is clearly a murderer, he otherwise despairs over the culture he was raised in and the emptiness of Japanese life. It's a lot of tense set-up for an otherwise conventional, if not gory resolution. The back third of the book could have made for an interesting short story but all told it felt disjointed, meandering and uneven.