Book Review: “Goodnight Tokyo” by Atsuhiro Yoshida
Nighthawks at the Diner
If you know me, you’ll know that I have something of a soft spot for Japanese fiction. Well, perhaps more particularly, the work of Haruki Murakami. From his work, I’ve branched off to reading other Japanese writers, but often find their work a little strange in their surrealism. (There must be something in the water on the other side of the world from where I live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.) Well, Atsuhiro Yoshida’s Goodnight Tokyo is no different. It is a short novel that features no less than 10 interconnecting short stories that can be read as a singular book, but it is strange in its telling. The book takes place solely throughout a few nights between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. — a time when reasonable people would be asleep, but, in the Tokyo of this novel, is a time when all sorts of people from film props procurers to call center workers do their best work. And things get pretty weird. We have a taxi driver who befriends a loquat thief, who is searching for the brother who ran away from home, who could be found by a man who is a detective that a film series is based on that the aforementioned procurer is trying to help get made and, and, and. This is a breathless novel that doesn’t slow down for an instant, piling on the characters to a point where realities blur and you’re not quite sure what might be going on or how a particular person fits into the jigsaw puzzle of the narrative.
However, in making that criticism, I will admit that I could be wrong in my judgment. Goodnight Tokyo is the English-language debut of author Yoshida, an award-winning book designer and author of more than 40 books. This is a well-respected Japanese writer who is en route to making a name for himself in North America and English-speaking Europe. (The book has already been translated into German and French.) Therefore, I can wholeheartedly say that the man is obviously doing something right. And Goodnight Tokyo is a book that isn’t too far removed from Murakami’s more surrealist works, in that the pair share the same kind of outlandishly off-beat and off-kilter tendencies. So, there’s that. However, I must confess that Goodnight Tokyo just wasn’t what I was expecting, and I wound up skimming through large swaths of it or not paying as close attention to it as I should have when I set out to review books. The reason goes back to the characters — there are far too many in a short book to keep track of and many of them have similar sounding names. Thus, it’s hard to get invested in any of these stories, and it’s a truism when I say that some of the character arcs are left with dangling threads at the novel’s end.
That all said, I’m curious as to why Goodnight Tokyo is being chosen as the lead book being translated into English by this author. Could it be that it has similar flourishes to manga? The kind of awkward characterizations that show up in the work of those Japanese comic books or even anime? Hard to say. However, if there’s one thing true about Goodnight Tokyo, it is that it appears — at times — to be weird for weirdness’ sake. There are plot points that appear to not go anywhere — such as a mild earthquake that doesn’t add anything to the plot other than to remind us that Japan is besieged by the phenomena. Still, there are things that I think about having just finished reading this work: namely, it seems to me that everyone in this short novel is collecting things, usually relating to things that are to be destroyed or killed. The procurer is looking for outlandish items to pepper into her film director’s sets, such as strange fruit and peanut crushers. (Though what importance a peanut crusher could have in a film is left hanging outside of a story having to do with the director going to the Southern United States and driving over a dog. Um, yeah. I dunno what to make of that.) There’s also a collector of telephones who destroys them as part of their garbage collection duties. There’s a second-hand store owner who sells all sorts of unusual, broken items — such as a clock that has two second hands. So, there’s stuff here to chew on. If you have the time and inclination.
I guess Goodnight Tokyo works if you approach it in a sort of fugue-like, dream-like state. It often doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and it just jumps around from one weird tale to another. That’s to say that this novel would have been a heck of a lot stronger if it had focused more squarely on the characterizations and maybe pared down the number of stories that it is trying to tell. Not to be churlish, but Yoshida tends to sometimes introduce characters mid-stream in the middle of doing something and only a page later loops back to their significance to the story (if that). This is why I’m wondering if I’ve lost something in the intention of this work as a native English speaker and if it makes more sense in its original Japanese. (And I’m not casting blame on the translator. It’s a matter of context. This novel might read differently in Japanese and while sitting in a darkened bar late at night in the titular city of this work.) Still, for all its faults, I suppose that I can express gratitude for reading this book. I have a love for Japanese culture because it is so foreign and, well, weird, and that appeals to a neurodivergent person like me. I’ll always have a soft spot for this type of fiction, and, even with its problems, Goodnight Tokyo is the sort of book that will tide you over to the next strange novel from the pen of Haruki Murakami — whom I adore, which makes me wonder why I didn’t love this book more. But that’s something else to chew on.
Atsuhiro Yoshida’s Goodnight Tokyo will be published by Europa Editions on July 9, 2024.
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