Tokyo Junkie 60 years of bright lights and back alleys . . . and baseball

Whiting (You Gotta Have Wa) recounts his decades in Tokyo, first as a soldier in 1962 and later as a sportswriter, with a patter that lands like readers have pulled up a barstool to hear a traveler's yarns. He witnesses Japan rise from the ashes of WWII in preparation for the 1964 Olympics, and Tokyo's transformation from a poor and polluted city into one in which he can barely afford to live. Whiting's own identity similarly evolves, with section titles including "The Soldier," "The Student," "The Degenerate," and "The Penitent." These phases are filled in with short essays, some journalistic, as in pieces about the Olympics, baseball, and politics. Others reflect on a wild youth with sardonic distance. In the degenerate era, which not surprisingly offers some of the most riveting vignettes, Whiting recalls his tipsy exploits in Shinjuku, the commercial and business center of Tokyo, and his brushes with the yakuza. Throughout, he vividly paints Tokyo as a boomtown built on the national traits of fighting spirit and maximal effort. Closing on the postponement of the 2020 Olympics due to Covid-19, both the narrator and Tokyo seem to have grown at least intermittently wiser with experience. Whiting's love for his adopted city remains constant and contagious in this collage-style survey. (Apr.)

A "callow young man…searching for an identity" finds a wondrous metropolis on the other side of the world. Whiting, who has authored multiple books on Japan and Tokyo, including Tokyo Underworld (1999), begins in 1962, when he was assigned to the city by the U.S. Air Force. In this heartfelt, clearly labor-of-love work, he chronicles both his vast personal changes as well as the enormous transformation that the city of Tokyo has undergone since the early 1960s. As a 19-year-old soldier from California, Whiting arrived just as Japan was gaining momentum economically and planning for the historic 1964 Olympics (Tokyo was the first city in Asia chosen to host the games). As Whiting vividly demonstrates, the preparations involved massive construction, congestion, pollution, noise, crowds, and lively nightlife, which the author depicts in rollicking fashion. At the time, the city "had more bars per square kilometer than anywhere in the world." Fortunately for Whiting, anti-Americanism from the war years had dissipated, and Americans were largely revered, especially by women. Once decommissioned, the author stayed on to experience this "crazy trip through the Looking Glass," first as a student and then English tutor and editor for Encyclopedia Britannica, "one of the fastest growing companies in Japan." Despite being warned by his more experienced American colleagues that Japan was not a place for a young man ("jaundiced advice that was easy to ignore"), Whiting stayed until he was 30 before moving to New York City--"the polar opposite to Tokyo in many glaring respects…a violent, decaying metropolis"--where he wrote a book about Japanese baseball, "a quintessentially American sport…that gave me my first true connection to Japan and its people." Throughout the book, the author delivers consistently entertaining details about nearly all aspects of Japanese daily life and culture, creating a priceless document of the rise of one of the world's great cities. A delightful memoir of the author's five-decade love affair with a city that "hypnotized" him and never let go. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.