Tokyo Vice first skulked across my radar last summer when Jake Adelstein spoke at the Frontline Club. I had tickets to the event but at the last minute, circumstances intervened and I missed out. It was a crying shame: this is the kind of memoir that, lively and engaging in book format, would verily crackle in the hands – and words – of the author himself.
Adelstein’s account of his twelve-year career as a journalist on the police beat in Tokyo is an accessible, pleasing read. That’s no back-handed way of saying the storytelling in Tokyo Vice is simplistic (it is clearly told but not dumbed down) or set out in a primitive parade of monosyllabic grunt-words (Adelstein is a skilled writer with a perfectly ample vocabulary – and in two languages at that). Rather, it’s a memoir that just unfolds itself from the outset, and for this reader, as for the half-dozen people I have recommended it to, it was difficult not to get carried along in the momentum of Adelstein’s crazy life.
One of the joys of the memoir form is in witnessing the author mature. This memoir spans a good fifteen years and the shadings of Adelstein’s self-portrait develop considerably during that time.
He starts out as the journalistic equivalent of a Wild West gunslinger, all balls and bravado, bedding a source in the name of the story and throwing a punch at a senior journalist on a night out. But as the stories he chases grow heavier and their shadows darker, and as Adelstein himself becomes a husband and father, he evolves beyond boisterous, act-first-apologise-later japery into a more thoughtful person and writer. His involvement with the Lucie Blackman case and his support for her family is sobering. His off-the-clock investigation into sex trafficking in hostess clubs is heartbreaking. And his ongoing efforts to be “an honourable man” in a neverending mudslide of dishonour are wonderfully human and hopeful.
Adelstein can speak, read and write Japanese. But far over and above this, he can also practice the business of investigative journalism in his second language. This is no menial thing: while he may forever be a gaijin to the Japanese, he has managed to learn and play back the rituals and shared memories that make up a culture. He’ll never be a native – and maybe nor would he want to be – but Adelstein is culturally bilingual, and this makes the reader’s journey an easy pleasure.
He regularly performs a dual role in Tokyo Vice, one moment running into the fray and shaking clues out of a dodgy hostess club, the next leaping smoothly to the reader’s side to explain the myriad subtleties of his greeting ritual with a Yakuza boss known as The Cat. Documentarian, fact-checker and leading man, Adelstein gives this book his all.
Toky Vice is, as my father would say, “a real yarn” – and trust me, folks, that ain’t no bad thing.
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