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Isaac Adamson works at a Web design firm in Chicago. He is the author of Hokkaido Popsicle and Tokyo Suckerpunch. His website is http://billychaka.com.
Hokkaido Popsicle
After an altercation with the director of Wildman for Geisha! --- a movie based on ace reporter Billy Chaka's life --- Chaka finds himself in Hokkaido on mandatory vacation. Trouble starts when the elderly porter of the Hotel Kitty stumbles into Billy's room and dies. That same night, the lead singer of Japan's most popular rock band turns up dead in a sleazy love hotel in Tokyo. Billy Chaka goes to Tokyo to cover the story for Youth in Asia magazine and soon finds out there's more to the rocker's apparent drug overdose than meets the eye. A Beatles-obsessed record executive, a mute DJ, two giant kickboxing twins with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music, a Swedish stripper working at the Purloined Kitten Club --- each play a part in the hard-boiled hilarity that ensues as Billy Chaka discovers that the rock star and the elderly hotel porter just might share a very strange link.
Isaac Adamson's summer Reading List
Futebol: The Brazilian Way
by Alex Bellos
It's a World Cup summer, but hopefully I can tear myself away from the television long enough to read this collection of fascinating anecdotes about the beautiful game and its central place in Brazilian life.
After the Quake
by Haruki Murakami
Murakami's first short story collection since 1994's startlingly original The Elephant Vanishes. In the years since he's become an international star largely because of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and it will be interesting to see what he's been up to in the shorter format.
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words
by Jay Rubin
Rubin was the translator of the above mentioned Wind-up Bird Chronicle and other Murakami works. I've always been curious about just how Murakami's jazzy, laidback style reads in his native Japanese, how he went about creating it, and how Rubin renders it in English. This book promises some answers, along with personal anecdotes about the author and his vision of Japanese society.
Standard Deviations: Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia
by Karl Taro Greenfeld
In 1994 Speed Tribes offered a startling mosaic portrait of Japan's youth. Greenfeld's next is a chronicle of his personal fast times and hard falls in an Asia few foreigners can glimpse. Greenfeld is a skilled reporter with a keen eye, and the story of his descent into heroin addiction promises to be an insightful and scary ride.
Cleveland Anonymous
by Kevin Gandal
A river in Cleveland catches fire and a young woman disappears. Twenty years later, a San Francisco earthquake cures a man of his crippling back problem and a voice urges him to go to New York to find his missing stepsister --- all of this by page fifteen of fellow Chicagoan Keith Gandal's debut novel. I have no idea what this book is about so far, but it should be fun finding out.
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