Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

Roberta, Lang and their friends experience the great Japanese city in all its manifestations to their inquiring, observing, and wandering minds as they banter over the details of a party, a film, Songs Common to Dreams, Tokyo’s history, the Names of Love.

Tokio Whip is a distinctly stylistic Yamanote station-by-station tour-de-force discovering the City of Language, the City as Language.

Genres: Fiction, Japan

370 pages, Paperback

Published May 7, 2016

Reviews

[Ian Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is something about the poetry of this work as a whole, and especially at spots, that makes it difficult to really dislike... however, it took me over 3 years to complete after I bought it brand new, and that’s not high praise.

I know more about Tokyo today than I did three years ago, and I think that helped the second half become more digestible. However, I don’t like pompous city dwellers any more today than I did then, and even if our author is judging his characters alongside us as we read, it doesn’t always help them be palatable.

Also, I got married quite young, but surely recall flirtatious and sexualized chit-chat as a student and all that, but do single people talk about f#%king as much as these characters do? Is it a Tokyo thing? (In Osaka maybe less talk more action? It’s certainly that way for food).

I can’t recommend this book unless you are knee deep in Tokyo and your own BS, but just to clarify, in some ways I hated this the way I hate Ulysses, for being style to the sacrifice of content. Or, like I hate On The Road, which is characters so true to the reality of beat-nicks that my pages were ripped from my punching them from hating being around such people for too long.

So, maybe TW has an audience, but as it’s lack of finding it so far may show, it’s a small audience and not for most.

I re-found this puzzle key to the books complexity (I read it 3 years ago as I struggled), but it is a puzzle in itself:

https://www.stonebridge.com/pdf/Pocke...



Full Review soon:

https://ianjoshyateswriting.blogspot....

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was inspired to read Arturo Silva's latest novel, Tokio Whip (2016), after reading a friend's review in The Japan Times, which asks if this is the first great Tokyo novel written by a non-Japanese. An intriguing question. On Facebook we had a discussion about other works, I thought there were some good novels but no great ones and offered up David Peace's two post-WWII crime novels Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City as my two favorites. Now that I have read Silva's book I can say that I don't think it is the great novel in question, but I can say it is probably the best novel about Tokyo written by a non-Japanese writer. I don't know much about Silva, save the facts in the author biography, and other than that he edited The Donald Richie Reader. But he has written a compelling love letter to Tokyo. The book is structured into two parts and 12 chapters which take their names from 24 of the 29 Yamanote line train loop stations (e.g. Chapter 1. Kanda-Tokyo). There is a love story that takes place between the main protagonists, Lang and Roberta, in Tokyo that allows for Silva's musings on the city to envelop. However, it gave him an opportunity to have them separate and live in two different areas of Tokyo(West-Kichijoji and Shitamachi-Yanaka), which allowed him to discuss the merits of both areas.It also has experimental unlabeled conversations between the two lovers and people from their circle of friends. For this reader, these two aspects were less compelling than his musings on Tokyo and the numerous "Stories and Myths of Tokyo": Kazuyoshi Miura: Murder in the Media, Sir William Rutland, Musashino Fujin, The Teigin Incident, Hazuko's Hoax, The Loves and Death of Osugi Sakae, Osen and Sokichi, Okisan, Bakin and the Eight Dogs, Hiraga Gennai and "Dutch Learning," 1657: The Fire of Long Sleeves, and 1457: Ota Dokan. I also liked how he dropped in cinematic references throughout the novel (he is said to be teaching cinema in Austria these days). He is a fan of Kenji Mizoguchi in a particular-as am I. There is a long description of one of his minor, but compelling films The Lady From Musashino. Interestingly, Silva makes no concessions for people unfamiliar with Tokyo and Japan-he uses Japanese phrase throughout and doesn't explain locations of the places he talks about. So for me, it is nostalgic and completely familiar, but for the general reader it might be somewhat mystifying. I applaud the decision to write it how he felt it.