Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore

A stream of Kerouac-like impressions of drugs, booze, sex, swimmingpools, airplanes, told by a travelling drugs-salesman in a not-to-far slightly dystopian future, who dips too deep into his own medicine which causes memory-loss. The whirlwind of anecdotes and short story snippets is entertaining and the language poetic, but quickly grows boring, as no real story-development happens. But then, about half way in, our hero overdoes his drugs and lands in a clinic, where he undergoes treatment for his complete memory-loss. The change in the storyline got me invested again, as it even included a first-person account of a Penfield stimulation experiment.

This book is a true piece of modern-day beat literature. The ubiquity of drugs in his narrative gives it a fluid impression – the drugs make his story hard to tell, but the drugs gave him a story to tell. We are taken through a dizzying series of vignettes, in Kerouac fashion, of short-term encounters with places and people, jumping from one continent to the next, suitcase of chemicals in tow. Memory is a weak force, and there is little connecting the stories to each other. There is a recurring half-memory of a woman. Everything may have started after her, but if she was indeed what the memory erasers were supposed to kill, then it is amusing how almost everything but her was lost.

Amidst the flurry of images is a blanket of dry contemplation, and I am reminded of Palahniuk. It reads like romantic nihilism. Like the detached sentimentality of a man who remembers nothing, or rather, only one thing.

10 stars out of 5.