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Overview
The Method Actors is set in Japan, New York, and New Zealand—places in an age of the global village and pervasive internationalism where many young people find themselves in transit. The story traces the disappearance of a young military historian named Michael Edwards from his desk in Tokyo. His sister Meredith returns to the city in search of him and there she meets up with old friends and acquaintances from all over the world: ex-JET exchange teachers from Canada, ex-drug addicts from Australia, drug dealers from the Netherlands, young American women with Japanese husbands, French kitchen hands, young Japanese mushroom growers, and wealthy young Chinese-Americans living the high life.
Meredith begins to encounter increasing evidence that Michael has been involved in a secret history going back through Japanese war crimes in China in World War II to the quarantining of Dutch merchants on manmade islands during Japan's period of isolationism in the seventeenth century. The secret history works as a juxtaposition to the moral ambiguity of modern gaijin life in Tokyo.
Stylistically daring, this multilevel narrative and cutting-edge debut novel questions no less than the moral framework of our modern world.
Synopsis
The Method Actors is set in Japan, New York, and New Zealand—places in an age of the global village and pervasive internationalism where many young people find themselves in transit. The story traces the disappearance of a young military historian named Michael Edwards from his desk in Tokyo. His sister Meredith returns to the city in search of him and there she meets up with old friends and acquaintances from all over the world: ex-JET exchange teachers from Canada, ex-drug addicts from Australia, drug dealers from the Netherlands, young American women with Japanese husbands, French kitchen hands, young Japanese mushroom growers, and wealthy young Chinese-Americans living the high life.
Meredith begins to encounter increasing evidence that Michael has been involved in a secret history going back through Japanese war crimes in China in World War II to the quarantining of Dutch merchants on manmade islands during Japan's period of isolationism in the seventeenth century. The secret history works as a juxtaposition to the moral ambiguity of modern gaijin life in Tokyo.
Stylistically daring, this multilevel narrative and cutting-edge debut novel questions no less than the moral framework of our modern world.
Publishers Weekly
Kiwi novelist Shuker's debut follows a set of gaijin-young international 20-somethings who have gravitated to ultrahip, fast-forward Tokyo-as one of their number goes missing. A young Wellington-born military historian researching the Rape of Nanking, Michael Edwards suddenly disappears from his coterie, and his ex-pat clan swings into action despite their own problems. Michael's sister Meredith, 22, rushes back from a U.S. trip and must negotiate their complicated family's concern, as well as her own lack of direction. Catherine (married at 24 and having recently ended an affair with Michael), Yasuhiko (a misfit ex-botanist drug dealer to the rich and foreign), New Zealander Simon and his occasional bedmate Jacques-all get involved to one degree or another, when they can stop thinking about fashion, sex or drugs. Shuker uses short sections titled by character to shift back and forth in time, place and perspective. Meredith tirelessly roots around her brother's life, but the complex, grandiose scope of Michael's research (which may hold the key) pales in comparison to the Tokyo appearance of Catherine's husband. Shuker's dizzying debut shimmers with authentic detail, an uncanny, otherworldly sense of place and a cast of believably hardcore hipsters. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.