Book log 2018 #19 - Tokyo Vice
TOKYO VICE by Jake Adelstein
Not a bad bit of true crime journalism memoir, covering Adelstein's career as a journalist on the crime beat for the Yomiuri Shinbun in Tokyo, and his rising from small local crimes to bringing down one of the biggest Yakuza gang bosses. It's eminently readable, and with some self-deprecating humour. I'm actually surprised it hasn't been turned into an HBO/Netflix type prestige miniseries. Some of it's hard to read, especially on the sex-trafficking front, and how he seriously fucked up and got a woman brutally murdered. Some of it's funny. Some of it seems oddly familiar (as a UK reader I vaguely remember the Lucy Blackman case from a few years ago, so it was interesting to get a fuller story on what happened there). And some of it I can sympathise with far too much.
There are some flaws - the opening scene doesn't get returned to in a way that places it chronologically in the progress of the story, for example - but the biggest problem is really its lack of an index- there are a lot of characters with confusing or similar names, nicknames,and so on, all getting the occasional “I'd known him since we had...” which all blend together, and it would be so fucking improved just by being to be able to go back and check the previous appearance on whichever page.
But it was worth reading, even if I came out of it thinking the guy is in many ways a fucking idiot who should have known better.
Not a bad bit of true crime journalism memoir, covering Adelstein's career as a journalist on the crime beat for the Yomiuri Shinbun in Tokyo, and his rising from small local crimes to bringing down one of the biggest Yakuza gang bosses. It's eminently readable, and with some self-deprecating humour. I'm actually surprised it hasn't been turned into an HBO/Netflix type prestige miniseries. Some of it's hard to read, especially on the sex-trafficking front, and how he seriously fucked up and got a woman brutally murdered. Some of it's funny. Some of it seems oddly familiar (as a UK reader I vaguely remember the Lucy Blackman case from a few years ago, so it was interesting to get a fuller story on what happened there). And some of it I can sympathise with far too much.
There are some flaws - the opening scene doesn't get returned to in a way that places it chronologically in the progress of the story, for example - but the biggest problem is really its lack of an index- there are a lot of characters with confusing or similar names, nicknames,and so on, all getting the occasional “I'd known him since we had...” which all blend together, and it would be so fucking improved just by being to be able to go back and check the previous appearance on whichever page.
But it was worth reading, even if I came out of it thinking the guy is in many ways a fucking idiot who should have known better.