I 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: