"Dreaming Pachinko" Gets Us Through the Week

This past week was a tough one at Massive HQ. A couple of us got slammed hard by this season's flu bug (if that's what it really was -- or, at very least, slammed by a gang of viscious cold symptoms). Our illness had us on our backs, confined to our apartments and shackled to our living room sofas for most of the week. This is not the most depressing way to spend four days, but it damn well sucks and we got little work done.

But being feverish, supine and doped up on Day-Quil allowed us to do a couple of good and bad things we don't do as much when we're healthy and fit -- 1.) read highly-addictive pulp novels about American magazine journalists fighing crime in Japan; and 2.) watch junk-food caliber cable TV programming. Case in point of the latter, VH1's Best Week Ever. Case in point of the former: the novel "Dreaming Pachinko" by Isaac Adamson (published by Perennial).

Dreaming Pachinko is a mystery, but not quite in the vein of Agatha Christie or Sue Grafton. Like Adamson's previous two novels, "Tokyo Suckerpunch" and "Hokkaido Popsicle," Dreaming chronicles the misadventures of Billy Chaka, a journalist for the Cleveland-based "Youth in Asia" magazine (whose name can be read as a grim, clever play on "euthenasia").

Chaka's beat is the obscure and sometimes ridiculous, the people and events in teen-oriented pop culture in far corners of East Asia, but mostly, it seems, in Japan. The journo-as-gumshoe-in-hardboiled-Tokyo world of Billy Chaka is highly entertaining, funny and as often accurate and illuminating about Japan as it is absurd. Adamson's prose style reads like Raymond Chandler, Haruki Murakami, and Elmore Leonard (with a dash of Kurt Vonnegut) all rolled up into one giant literary dragon roll of punk storytelling.

We loved Tokyo Suckerpunch and Hokkaido Popsicle when we read them a couple of years ago. Now that we've been through Dreaming Pachinko, we're hungry for more. The good news is that Adamson has a new, fourth Billy Chaka book out in Perennial paperback called "Kinki Lullaby." Can't wait.

Essential Links

Official Isaac Adamson Billy Chaka Website

Posted by typhoon at October 23, 2005 02:31 PM