In The Miso Soup

It's just before New Year. Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank's behaviour is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible thought that his client may be in fact the killer currently terrorizing the city. Kenji is a likeable, if far from innocent guide, leading the reader through the inferno of violence and evil into which he apparently unwillingly descends - and from which only Jun, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, can possibly save him. Kenji's intimate knowledge of Tokyo's sex industry, his thoughtful observations and wisecracks, his insights into the emptiness and hypocrisy of contemporary Japan, and his ultimate moral paralysis and complicity reveal a deeply distressed and rotten modern world that seems to have lost its way in search of pleasure and instant gratification.