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Tokyo Vice (February 2012)
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February's book is Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein.
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Yessssss!
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Book's good.
But also crazy depressing. -
My kinda book.
Actually, right now I'm hunting for legal treatises and econ textbooks on Amazon, so there's no way this can be worse for my brain. -
Books good? Nice I can get back on the club train.
Crazy depressing? Ooh well I'm out, see you next month maybe. -
This book has one of the most bad ass introductions I've ever read.
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Yeah, I just started and the prelude was pretty awesome. The only thing is, Im actually having difficulty accepting this as actually biographical and not just fiction in my brain. Like in that prolog there's the line:
"...Write the article, and there is nowhere in this country that we will not hunt you down. Understand?"
It just seems so unreal that these things actually happen and people actually do talk like that and its kinda weirding me out.
(NOTE: This may just be because I grew up in a city with a total population of 1,000 and being in a place with actual crime and not just the occasional meth lab is completely foreign to me) -
Was this book mentioned on the daily show a while back?
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Man, I'm gonna have to either find a way to read both this and Name of The Wind at the same time or breeze through this one first. Leaning towards the latter.
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Name of the Wind goes really quickly. I've been reading the sequel, Wise Man's Fear, alongside four other books, and I'm still about 400 pages into it. It's wonderful when easy reading can feel so rewarding.
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Yup.kaazuwulf said:Was this book mentioned on the daily show a while back?
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Many parts of the book came off as extremely sensational to me. I don't know how one asks "so this incredibly depressing book about your life, how much of it is actually real?"
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Dave said:
Many parts of the book came off as extremely sensational to me. I don't know how one asks "so this incredibly depressing book about your life, how much of it is actually real?"
Neither did Oprah, Dave. It happens to the best of us.
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Heh, that's the first thing I thought of after reading that post. Just picked it up today, and burritobandito was right, that prologue is one hell of a hook.
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This book's subtitle should be "A Record of Loose Women I Slept With While in Japan."
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I'm around page 200, and I'm definitely getting that vibe. I'm not comfortable with his excuse of "well my wife - who is pretty much raising our daughter on her own - knew I was a reporter when we met, so she's cool with this."
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The Joel said:
This book's subtitle should be "A Record of Loose Women I Slept With While in Japan."
I loved the story overall, but I agree that there was a noticeable amount of bragging. -
Did he even sleep with more than one woman other than his wife?
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I only remember the girlfriend, his wife, and the woman he cheated on his wife with, though it's been a while since I read the book and I do have vague memories of him being like "but I did have many maaaaany other indiscretions"
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There were two women before he was married: his girlfriend when he first joined the Yomiuri and the speed addict hostess he hooked up with for a while. He also got a happy ending that included getting speared in the anus while married.
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Dave said:
I only remember the girlfriend, his wife, and the woman he cheated on his wife with, though it's been a while since I read the book and I do have vague memories of him being like "but I did have many maaaaany other indiscretions"
I remember him mentioning that his wife was cool with him fooling around with the other women that he had as sources, and that she insisted "just no sex" but if he did have sex, use a condom. I inferred that meant he was going around, getting BJs and taking names. -
xenomouse said:
I'm around page 200, and I'm definitely getting that vibe. I'm not comfortable with his excuse of "well my wife - who is pretty much raising our daughter on her own - knew I was a reporter when we met, so she's cool with this."
If his wife actually did consent to his indiscretions, though, then he wasn't morally culpable. Consent is everything in relationships. Haven't begun the book yet, as I screwed up and left it in Ohio, but I'll burn through it as soon as I get back. I'm eager to pivot off Eco and onto this, even if it has flaws. -
She less consented and more resigned herself. And there's the looming specter of "Japanese wife" to it. Like "oh, this is just what men do. it's just something you have to deal with."
Which is pretty douchey, but I'm not here to cast specific judgments. He's said publishing that book almost destroyed his marriage. He at least understand the situation intellectually, if not emotionally and in his defense I don't think he comes off as a narcissist. -
It is a well-established legal rule that minors and Japanese wives cannot provide consent.
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For the Lucie Blackman story, he made it sound as though he was spending pretty much all his free time with half naked women.
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Yeah, that sounded pretty sweet.
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Yeah, especially that part where he finally noticed each of the women had the same dead look in their eyes. That was super cool.
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I am about halfway done. What would have made the first half of this book way better is more sit downs with yakuza. Well he should have at least been more consistent on the details. There were parts that were super detailed but then he would just skim over something and I had to pause and go wait what just happened?
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That part at the end where Jake gets the pictures. That's messed up. I don't know what I would do if someone gave me something like that. I consider myself a peace-loving man, but I felt nothing but rage upon reading that.
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I'll be ready to podcast on this one in about a week. Anybody champing at the bit to talk about it with me?
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No one cool ever wrote it correctly.
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I'd be down for doing a podcast about it.
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And so it shall be.
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Holy shit. That's nuts. It'll make a good film if they do it right, but I just don't see it being better than the book. His depressing insights seem best relayed as lengthy asides to a reader.
Maybe David Fincher can direct. Yes.
