Tokyo Stories: Life, Love And Laughter In The Big City
(Christine Miki)
Tales of the city from a writer who knows how it looks from myriad angles. Most of the viewpoint characters are privileged and moneyed, like Henry, the Porsche-driving financier and babe magnet of the chapter titled "Sex, Lies, and Too Much Champagne" who picks up girls like pollen but embarrassingly underestimates Japanese determination when it comes to shedding them. Others are gaijin struggling with English teaching and hostess work, trying to realize themselves in a denaturing social jungle that demands fakery and display.
It is ingeniously constructed and organized to be readable either as short stories or as chapters in a socially panoramic novel reminiscent of Short Cuts, the Altman film of the Raymond Carver stories. The storylines intertwine and characters gossiped about in one story are seen from the inside in another. Once suspicions are allayed about a certain self-admiration and brand-consciousness in the authorial point of view, it becomes clear what a subtle and worldly-wise writer Christine Miki is, and how sharp her eye for farcical sexual entanglements and party disasters. She describes a round of casual relationships and bitchy one-upmanship with comic aplomb and shrewd sensitivity.
It has to be said that it is doubtful that the book would have appeal far beyond the gaijin community in Japan--a reflection of its literary limitations--but nevertheless must stand as one of the best depictions available of a particular kind of cosmopolitan social life in Tokyo in a particular era. You might barely be aware from these stories that a few Japanese people live in Tokyo as well, though their social and inner lives remain inscrutable, and their consciousness disappointingly is not subjected to Miki's sophisticated treatment.
Having said that, some of the best writing in the book concerns Espie, the long-suffering Filipina maid whose quiet virtue is eventually rewarded.
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