Reviews

Tokyo by Michael Mejia

siena_j_p's review against another edition

challenging mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I really wanted to enjoy this because the premise was so delightfully bizarre. And I did find the first section fascinating. Unfortunately, after that section the book moved into the territory of “I don’t have the slightest idea what’s happening anymore”. I’m not a fan of what my mom and I like to call ‘gimmicky’ books, where it seems like the author is working way too hard to seem avant-garde and not nearly hard enough to make the book accessible to the reader. That was definitely the vibe I got here. It’s entirely possible that I just wasn’t putting enough thought into the book, since I read it while on vacation, but to be honest I just don’t understand how the majority of the book provided enough information to create a coherent narrative. So, unfortunately this one wasn’t my thing, but I’m giving it three stars because I recognize that this is likely more a matter of personal preference than necessarily a problem with the book itself.

peeled_grape's review against another edition

It is embarrassing how little of a grasp I had on this. I have no idea how to read it. The first fifty or so pages are perfectly accessible, and then the novel totally shifts. The genre and tone changed so suddenly I didn't know whether or not we were even in the same story, and then, by the time I realized it was the same story, I already felt as if I had been thrown in the deep end. This is part of the work of the novel, though: There is the play with gender and race and performance and the relationship between all of that, but almost as much a part of this is the reader's experience. Take the focus on pausing, for example -- there is an unrelenting amount of em dashes in this, which creates pauses instead of clean sentences that flow all the way through. There is also the images, which throw a break in the text, and the sentence fragments and the line breaks and the English spellings (?) for Japanese words. Given this isn't a translation and was published in the U.S., I'm assuming that we are meant to make us pause to look them up or suffer through not understanding it. Even the first section plays into this -- the writing itself is distracted, something accomplished through the narrator's voice, forcing us to wait for an explanation for what the "Tuna Affair" is, even though it's introduced in the first sentence.

All of this is very good and interesting work, but I have no idea what to do with it yet. I have a feeling I'll come back to this in a few years and then be like !! oh! But today is not that day.