TOKYO
Saburo and I entered the Tokyo Central Wholesale Market at approximately 7:45 on the morning of 21 April.
TOKYO
TOKYO is an incisive, shape-shifting tour de force, a genre-bending mix of lyric prose, science fiction, horror, and visual collage exploring the erotic undercurrents of American perceptions of Japanese culture and identity.
By turns noir, surreal, and clinical in its language and style, TOKYO employs metaphors of consumption, disease, theater, gender fluidity, monstrousness, and ecological disaster in intertwined accounts touching on matters of cultural appropriation, fiction's powerful capacity to produce immersive realities, and the culturally corrupting late capitalist excesses that entangle both the United States and Japan.
Book trailer for TOKYO
Advance Praise
“TOKYO is rewarding and responsible in that its form is all about process and awareness—of readership, authorship and culture. If you're up for a book that upends what a story usually looks like, find Michael Mejia's TOKYO.”
—SLUG Magazine
“A noir told through bodies, Michael Mejia’s TOKYO is a song—a labyrinth—an obfuscation that leaves the reader ravenous for more gleaming riddles—oh!—enticing enigma.”
—Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary
“In TOKYO the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastical flex, blur, and eventually disappear altogether. Beautifully propelling us through a series of styles and voices, moving from words to photographs to paintings and back again, this is a novel that first draws us in, then reveals itself as a novel, then becomes an embodied interrogation of art and originality. A highly original and provocative work.”
—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses
"TOKYO is a profound work of finding, boketto on subliminal steroids, a staggering stare into a teeming, occluded, saturated nothingness."
—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana
“Visually arresting and gorgeously terrifying, Michael Mejia’s passionate immersion in a TOKYO of the imagination delivers an electrifying rush of sizzling sensations, a proliferation of ethical provocations, and the erotic thrill of intimate betrayal.”
—Melanie Rae Thon, author of Voice of the River, Silence & Song, and The 7th Man
