Roppongi
By Nick Vasey
Createspace
Copyright © 2012
364 pages
$25.00 at Amazon.com
$9.99 Kindle

Peripatetic Australian Zack Morrissey is a chick magnet and all round likeable guy in 1998, back when international travel wasn’t so complicated. He’s crewing on a tourist boat in Israel, partying it up and having a good time, but not a wild time; also he’s not making as much money as he wants. Hence the compelling need to return to a notorious district of Tokyo called—and vividly depicted in Nick Vasey’s debut novel—Roppongi.

Why Roppongi? In short, it is:

. . . a non-stop party-shop, a crazy rollercoaster-ride of drugs, drinking, partying and gorgeous women. Money flowed freely from a slashed, seemingly limitless financial aorta, and it was actually his job to make every night the biggest party he could. Since everyone was hell-bent on getting as fucked-up as they could as often as they could, his job was perhaps better defined as conductor to this hedonistic orchestra. Lawyers, bankers, brokers, wankers . . . it really didn’t matter. They’d all come to his bar thirsting for a wild time. And how he’d delighted them! Under his expert helmsmanship, Bongoes had become legendary for excess.

That excess, and a difficult breakup, had driven Zack out two years before. Now Zack is ready to explore and exploit its possibilities again. His adventures begin promisingly on the flight to Tokyo where Zack charms a married flight attendant for a tryst in Roppongi. From there, it’s a wild ride of sex, drugs, and violence as Zack re-integrates himself into Tokyo’s underworld. Through mostly Zack’s observations, the inanimate but highly animated character of Roppongi emerges, rising to the level of some mythical beast that rewards those who embrace its culture—particularly the outsiders, the ‘gaijin’—with a surrealistic party atmosphere always on the go. Zack is ideally suited for this environment, and vice (pun intended) versa. For the reader he’s a wonderful guide and for the friends who fatefully join him there, a one-man welcome committee.

It doesn’t take long for Zack to re-establish his place as a drug conduit and start making lots of money, but it does take some time before a concrete plot emerges. This occurs when Zack’s drug activities—and his  general popularity and influence in Roppongi—draws the enmity of Max, an ambitious Nigerian trying to penetrate Tokyo’s criminal element. Max is a nasty, violent character who comes to epitomize the menace of Roppongi. People begin to die as Max steps up his efforts to infiltrate a Tokyo gang. Zack sees what’s going on but finds himself powerless to do much about it, especially after he falls in true love with a Canadian girl, whom he must protect. But protect from what? Max? Roppongi? Himself?

Taken as a travelogue, Roppongi works very well. The descriptions of the area, and Japanese culture in general from an ex-pat’s point of view, are well crafted with fluid, energetic prose:

In a few short steps they voyaged to a parallel dimension. A world of darkness and rising mists, of flashing strobes mixed with a sea of UV-enhanced psychedelic colour. Insinuating itself throughout this fantastic dreamscape was the relentless pumping energy coming from the speakers. The energy was absorbed, mutated, and subsequently reflected in exultation by the seething mass of super-charged people crowding the dance-floor.

As a novel, though, the book did not succeed as well. The plot was not as exciting as the environment—which could be taken as a compliment to the handling of the setting—and took too long to unfold for my taste.

Part of that is due to overwriting in parts, such as the long setup for the scene in the morgue. The over-reliance on adverbs occasionally led into purple prose, as did a tendency to favour decorative verbs over “said” in speaker attributions. Much of the dialogue could have been pared down. It all made the book seem longer than it needed to be, a common trait with self-published works.

The proofreading, on the other hand, while not perfect, is far better than most self-published books. What errors exist are inconsequential and have no negative impact on the reading.

I also had trouble relating to Zack; he isn’t my type of character. He’s an unusually lucky and talented guy who doesn’t need to invest much effort in things. It all comes easily to him, be it work, sex, accommodation, drugs. His women are universally drop dead gorgeous and he always wins at pool, unless he’s trying not to. Bad things do happen to him, or rather to the people he cares about, but there is an apparent invincibility about him that, by contrast, weakens the other characters, who are otherwise appealing. It was hard for me to pull for Zack, not because he was unlikeable, but because it doesn’t seem he needs anyone to pull for him.

In a scene on a lake with the Carla, the charming Canadian girl he falls in love with, he hesitates to swim, claiming he doesn’t know how. Aha, he’s not perfect, the reader thinks. But no, he then jumps into the water, fearlessly. Not even a hint of kryptonite for this Super-dude. A minor weakness such as an inability to swim could have provided a window to what has to be a lonesome and troubled soul inside. Though he masks it by a generous and charismatic exterior, Zack is driven by an every-man-for-himself philosophy that promotes lying to get jobs, doing and dealing drugs, and rationalizing other short cuts in life. Zack does experience personal growth in the novel and the events do make a deep impact on him. But I wasn’t convinced those impacts would be lasting.

What is lasting is the impression of Roppongi. There’s no denying this novel is an R-rated whirlwind that will likely prove great entertainment for people less pickier than me, the pro-Zacks (pun not intended) who probably make up the majority of the audience this author is trying to reach.

Summerworld, by Serdar Yegulalp, is one of those books that landed on our “Pick me” tab quite a while ago.  Serdar was one of the very first authors to query his book to us here at LLBR when we were getting started, and we almost passed on it.  I’m so glad we didn’t.  It’s philosophical journey, mixed with fantasy and realism and set in a world created somewhere between our own and whatever else is out there, is one I am now happy to have taken.

First, the book’s brilliant cover deserves much attention.  I love the pale colors behind the black and white character.  Those who love Japanese art, or fans of Anime, will appreciate this book cover.  It is very fitting for this story.  Although the author offers much description of the actual place, Summerworld, it would have been nice to have a taste of such images on the cover as well just to give the reader’s imagination a hint of what the author had in mind.  But don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed conjuring up my own fantastical images as I read this story.

We start with a simple letter received by Dr. Hirofumi from a patient of his who wishes to meet up with him again and catch up.  Yegulalp stuns his reader by simply stating the obvious, rather than dragging out the story and keeping you guessing.  This letter is quite disturbing because the patient who wrote it has been dead for three years.  The letter reads…

“It’s a shame we haven’t been able to see each other, but life interferes with everything we want from it anyway.”

How true is that?!

Imagine if you were to receive such a letter in the mail one day from a dead relative calling you to come and meet with them at a resort.  Would you go?  Being a psychoanalyst, Dr. Hirofumi’s interest is peaked and so he sets out to find this patient and to find out the truth.  He soon enters a world now known as Summerworld where the rules of yesterday have long been forgotten.  If you enjoy reading fantasy, the description alone of how this place came to be will definitely grab hold of your attention and not let go, not even long after you’ve finished the last page of this book.

I really enjoyed this story because it is not cluttered with lots of subplots which you have to follow.  It takes you back to a place and time when our attention spans did not require so much detail to be appeased.  This story is the journey of the main character seeking out the truth in a world that is not our own.  That’s it.  With a nice balance of dark and light, real and fantasy, hero and villian, the author has really put a lot of time and consideration into creating this amazing tale.  Not a single sentence is wasted.

Imagine taking a train to a place you’ve never been before, and when you get off that train you are in a place much like the world you’ve always imagined to be waiting for you there, but somehow things are very different.  The discovery our lead character goes through in this new place, discovering people are much the same as from the world he knew and yet they are changed, is truly beautiful.  All the while, he never loses focus on finding his lost friend who left him that curious note.

Serdar Yegulalp’s writing style is very simplistic, and yet complex…and again there’s that nice balance between oposing forces which we find as harmony in his book, and if you look around, in our world as well.  So, spend some time in Summerworld.  It is a journey worth taking.