Japantown by Barry Lancet

San Francisco art dealer Jim Brodie is fluent in Japanese because he grew up in Japan as his father was establishing a private security business. The father, now dead, left his half of the business to Jim, who over the years improved his fighting, shooting, and detecting skills. The most precious thing in Brodie's life is his six-year-old daughter, Jennie.

On page 1, a SFPD Lieutenant calls Brodie to Japantown to consult on a murder. Five tourists from Tokyo, three adults and two children, have been slaughtered on the street. No witnesses, no clues except a piece of paper with a Japanese character written on it—the same character that had been painted on the Los Angeles sidewalk in front of the house in which Brodie's Japanese wife, uncle, and aunt had died in a fire three years earlier. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Japantown is a superior thriller, not a mystery. While Brodie narrates the bulk of the story, author Barry Lancet switches to third person POV at the end of Chapter 2 to show us a mysterious character scanning the Japantown murder scene with night vision goggles. This character, representing something called Soga, recognizes that Brodie is not a cop, that he's wearing a Japanese ball cap ("Bad news"), and that with a photograph of the license on Brodie's Cutlass and a phone call he'd have the owner's name, address, and other information within thirty minutes. Brodie doesn't know what he's stepped in but we readers have intimations.

I don't want to say much more. This is Lancet's first thriller, and you can learn more about him, the book, and Japan on his website. Lancet's visit to Japan turned into "a position at one of the country's top publishing houses, and in twenty-five years he developed numerous books across many fields but mostly on Japanese culture—including art, crafts, cuisine, history, fiction, Zen gardens, martial arts, Asian philosophy, and more. All of which were sold in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world. The work opened doors to many traditional worlds, lending a unique insider's view to his own writing."

Perhaps as a result, Japantown does not read like a first effort. The Soga organization that Brodie and his associates in the Tokyo detective agency have to combat, while extraordinary is not entirely preposterous. Lancet, after all, has the example of Aum Shinrikyo as a secretive, vicious group. Because Lancet knows Japan—the language, the culture, the custom—so well and is able to weave that factual, authoritative information into the narrative, we are willing (I am willing) to suspend disbelief and accept the novel's more improbable incidents and revelations. If you want a thrilling ride on a fast machine, Japantown is your vehicle.

Whispers of Vivaldi by Beverle Graves Myers

Whispers of Vivaldi is Beverle Graves Myers’ fourth Tito Amato mystery (and the first I’ve read). She set herself an interesting challenge: to write convincingly from the point of view of an 18^th century Italian castrato. A castrato, of course, is “a male singer castrated in boyhood so as to retain a soprano or alto voice.” In earlier books, Tito has apparently been a star of Italian opera but is now no longer able to sing.  (One of the many things Myers does well is weave in enough of Tito’s history from, I assume, the earlier books without disrupting the flow of this one. You don’t have to read the first three Tito Amato mysteries to enjoy Whispers of Vivaldi.)

It is 1745, Venice in the last years of La Serenissima, a city mad about opera, and Tito is the assistant director of Teatro San Marco, the Senate-sponsored opera house. Unfortunately, the San Marco has been losing subscribers to Teatro Grimani, “a house known for mounting lightweight operas filled with pretty tunes and even prettier prima donnas.” Tito convinces his friend and mentor and the San Marco’s director they should mount something new and different, The False Duke, a score by an young violinist who teaches the young woman at the same “foundling” hospital at which Vivaldi had taught twenty years earlier.

To mount the opera, of course, Tito has to obtain permission from the Savio alla Cultura, “the patrician official charged with collecting a portion of the theater’s revenue for the Republic’s coffers.” And to ensure success, Tito, his English brother-in-law, and his manservant, travel to Milan to engage a young castrato who sings so beautifully, gossips in Venice claim he’s actually a girl.

So we have a fascinating narrator in Tito. A convincing picture of Venice in the mid-1700s with theater rivals willing to sabotage a production, competing castrati, a powerful and intelligent police chief (“Messer Grande” who is mentioned in the memoirs of Casanova), masked balls, faro tables, Carnavale, and, of course, murder.

You don’t have to have been to Venice or to love opera (or Vivaldi) to enjoy Whispers of Vivaldi. But if you have been to or do love opera (and don’t want to plow through the six volumes of Casanova’s History of My Life) this is a skillful, engaging, convincing story from the time.

Nothing Remains the Same by Wendy Lesser

Wendy Lesser, the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, had the good idea of rereading certain books she'd read as a student to see how her perceptions of them had changed. She studied literature as an undergraduate at Harvard and as a graduate student at Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley. She's published ten books, most recently Why I Read: The Serious Pleasures of Books (2014). Nothing Remains the Same (2002) was her sixth book and she was in her late 40s when she wrote it.

I mention her age because it is significant. Lesser compares quite candidly her youthful reactions, thoughts, impressions of books to her thoughts now twenty or thirty years later. She impressed me because she could remember the books she discusses so vividly. I am not sure I could say anything about any book I read in my teens and twenties.

(Not entirely true. Not long ago in a used book store I found a novel by Philip Wylie, Opus 21, which had so dazzled me as a 17-year-old I wrote Wylie a fan letter. I could not recall any details of the story, and when I reread it I could not imagine what on earth I'd thought was so wonderful. Perhaps the apparently glamorous life of a freelance magazine writer, but on rereading it I found it totally preposterous and mystified by my 17-year-old self.)

I was also impressed by the works Lesser discussed. To name only those I have never read (and thereby expose myself as a literary ignoramus): Portrait of a Lady, Don Quixote, Alexander Pope's "Epistle IV: To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington," The Education of Henry Adams, Anna Karenina, The Idiot, the short stories of D.H. Lawrence, The Winter's Tale, Paradise Lost, Huckleberry Finn, A Hazard of New Fortunes. What makes Lesser's "blend of autobiography, literary analysis, and self-analysis" (Oliver Sacks quote) so delightful is that you do not have to have read the books to understand and enjoy her comments. 

Nothing Remains the Same makes me want to finally read some of these classics, to read more of Wendy Lesser's works, and to reread some of the books that I can recall.

My Made it Moment

Another writer, Jenny Milchman, maintains an interesting site on her blog, Suspense Your Disbelief,  called "Made it Moments." She invites writers to answer the question "How did I know I'd made it?" in 300 to 500 words. It's an interesting challenge, and it made me think about my writing and my career as a writer in a way I don't usually consider.

First, I'm not sure how I would measure whether I'd actually made it. A front-page review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review? A National Book Award? A Pulitzer Prize? Do you ever finally "make it"? Speaking for myself, I hope not. I hope I continue to grow and change as a writer and an artist.

Nevertheless, Jenny's offer was too good to pass up. We all have moments that stand out from the buzz and press of events, and I managed to write about a recent one in my life. Click on the link above and and you can read it and the comments it's provoked. 

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

John Green does not need my support. The Fault in Our Stars is a massive best-seller and the movie version is due out this spring. According to his brief bio, Green has won the Printz Medal, a Printz Honor, and the Edgar Award. He’s twice been a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. But because some of you—and you know who you are—may not be regularly exposed to young adult fiction, you may not have heard of The Fault in Our Stars or dismissed it despite its popularity. This means you are missing something extraordinary.

The novel is told in the first person by Hazel Grace Lancaster, who sets the tone immediately: “Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.”

Hazel’s cancer has settled in her lungs and is currently being held at bay by a new drug. Her mother and Doctor Jim, who adjusts her meds, decide she needs Support Group, “a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness.” In Group, she meets Augustus Waters, another cancer survivor, whose right leg has been amputated. They become best friends.

Another of Hazel’s friends, although he doesn’t know it, is Peter Van Houten, “the reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction, the book that was as close to a thing as I had to a Bible. Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s like to be dying and (b) not to have died.” An Imperial Affliction book seems to end inconclusively and although Hazel has written Van Houten any number of letters to ask about the characters, he’s never answered. Gus is so taken by the book and so involved with Hazel, he uses his one wish from The Genie Foundation, “which is in the business of giving sick kids one wish,” to take Hazel and her mother to Amsterdam to meet Van Houten.

The Fault in Our Stars is a number of things, all done extraordinarily well. It is an investigation into feelings about death. It is a poignant love story. It is a comic novel (I laughed aloud at several points). It is a meditation on literature, what it means, what it can mean, and the difference between the writer and the writing. It is, I think, finally, an illustration of what it means to accept reality. As Gus says, “The world is not a wish-granting factory.” Despite considerable propaganda to the contrary (most advertising, fiction, movies, TV shows, songs, and more), he’s right.

Post Road Promises by Jim Ramsey

It’s the summer of 1979 in Greenwich, Connecticut. Steven Rollins, a town native, works as a reporter on the Greenwich Time after a stint on the Hartford bureau of The New York Times and the Hartford Courant. He’s a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism (one of the best in the country), in his late 20s, tall, single, living alone in a house he inherited. The house is on the former estate of Steven’s grandparents; now much of the land is the new high school and the big house is owned by a New York City banker.

Patty Callahan is in her early 20s, a striking blond who recently graduated from UConn with a double major in finance and psychology. She works as a teller in a local bank and as a part-time lifeguard at the YMCA. She is the sort of girl who is willing to expose herself to peeping Toms (a $10 floats down from the ceiling above where she is changing, a bill she returns to Building Supervisor without comment) and to use her body to promote an embezzlement scheme.

Author Jim Ramsey grew up in Greenwich and is a former reporter. He knows the newspaper business and he knows the Greenwich of the 1970—the ball fields, the bars, the shops along the Post Road, which runs through the town, the local politics—and he recalls the music and concerns of the period.

In the course of Post Road Promises Steven begins dating a young widow—her husband was killed in Vietnam—stumbles across information that tickles his reporter’s instincts, and, in an exciting development, spectacularly avoids a beating for a news story that had thoroughly offended one of the local characters.

Post Road Promises, as a debut novel, is a picture of a time and a place—a real time in a real place. I believed almost without exception that these people would have acted in this way in Greenwich, now one of the wealthiest towns in America, at the time. I’m not convinced that any young woman would have been as blasé as Patty when she realized she was inadvertently displaying herself in the YMCA locker room. Perhaps with a little more background and motivation, Ramsey could have made her motivation(s) more convincing. That, however, is only a minor quibble in a book that offers other pleasures.

Musui's Story by Katsu Kokichi

The full title of this book is Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai. The author, Katsu Kokichi, who was born in 1802 and died in 1850, titled his autobiography Musui dokugen. "Musui," the name Katsu took upon retirement, means "dream-besotted;" "dokugen" means monologue or talking to oneself.

The book, as Teruko Craig, the translator points out in her introduction, is unique—"the autobiography of a samurai who was neither a scholar nor an administrator, and certainly not a model of feudal loyalty." Katsu was of low rank and poorly educated, but, by his account, a skillful swordsman and clearly had street smarts.

As a child, he was a scamp, running away from home twice, the first time when he was fourteen. He had stolen money from the household only to have it, his swords, and kimono stolen during the second or third night on the road leaving him in his underrobe. He lived rough on the road for two months, finally returning home to Edo (present-day Tokyo). Had he remained away much longer, shogunal officials would have taken measures to end the family line, that is reduce them to commoners.

Katsu begins his account with a Prologue that says in effect: I am going to tell you how you shouldn't live--not like me. Although, for some inexplicable reason, I have not been punished by Heaven for all my sins and misdeeds. He concludes, "My past conduct truly fills me with horror. Let my children, their children, and their children's children read this record carefully and savor its meaning. So be it."

Between his prologue and final reflections, Katsu gives a lively account of someone living mostly by his wits, married but a regular habitué of the Yoshiwara tea houses, running a protection racket, lying, cheating, stealing, brawling and scheming. It is a picture of a world that is both alien in its customs and expectations and obligations and familiar from dozens of samurai movies. A lot of fun.