POSTS
Revisiting "Tokyo Vice"
BlogI read Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice just after Lauren and I moved back to San Francisco. It was a period of great insomnia for me. I’d sit up in the study of our short-term rental on States Street in Corona Heights and look out over the Castro Valley and the Diamond Heights neighborhoods. Winter storms would come up the Peninsula or churn about in the Bay before whipping westward across the Castro valley and on into the ocean. I joined the San Francisco Public Library and started checking out books.
On several of the nights or early mornings during our tenancy, I would sit up with a solitary lamplight on, reading. One of my favorite books in that era was the book, Tokyo Vice, which has recently been converted into a limited run series on HBO Max. Lauren and I watched the first episode (brought to the screen by auteur of night, the underworld, and neon, Michael Mann) and found it intense and compelling.
Back in 2010 though, after I posted a review on this site, I even got a comment from Mr. Adelstein himself. I stopped hosting comments on my blog years ago (too much spam to keep up with), but I kept Mr. Adelstein’s comment in a snapshot. You can read what a great storyteller he is in it:
To be compared to Hemingway is a great honor. He was a great newspaperman (reporter) before he was a novelist. I’m more of a Steinbeck fan myself, and while he may be considered maudlin by some, his essays are amazing.
I bent the truth as little as possible but obviously the yakuza don’t generally have a great sense of humor, nor do the police, and I didn’t want to burn my sources.
Your analysis of the book was very well done and glad you appreciated the use of “dusk” for the third part. I was debating whether to use the Japanese word??? (tasogare) or ??? (yugure) for that section. I ended up using yugure, because it’s more of an objective word. Tasogare is a beautiful word for dusk, and it describes that point where there is still enough light to see but not to really make out who’s coming towards you. Supposedly it’s a word that refers to classical Japanese for “who’s there?”.
Metaphorically, it’s used to refer to the point after a career has reached it’s peak and the time before retirement.
I can still see a little bit forward and I don’t think I have yet entered that cycle of my life. At least, I hope so.
By the way, the Chinatown riff was inspired. I was always hoping that when I was covering the 4th district in Tokyo, that someone would say to me, “Forget about it, Jake. It’s Kabukicho.” But it never happened.
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I remember reading that the Hopi language doesn’t really have a clear past tense, that everything is in a state of becoming. And sitting in my poor excuse for an office back in the United States, which is a retrofitted 1960’s Airstream mobile home, listening to the rain pound the roof, and surrounded by piles of books and articles I wrote years ago, it seems to me that their view of reality is probably correct. The past is never over, it stays with us and continues to become something else.
Thanks for the review. And you quoted the section that is one of my favorites. I wrote it one six hour sitting. It was like shedding skin…
jake
I’m glad to hear that Mr. Adelstein has done well for himself and was excited to learn that a sequel to the book is to be published in 2023! I hope that, should he find himself in NYC or catch this post in his Google Alerts, he’ll reach out!
FWIW: After reading Travels with Charley I see what Mr. Adelstein meant about being closer to Steinbeck than Hemingway: there’s a frankness that they have that often gets romanticized away in Hemingway.