DEAR JUDGE ICHIRO
As spring comes to Tokyo, it becomes clear that a British English teacher has been killed. Thomas Browne, believing himself responsible, begins a series of recollections to discover how a handful of innocent and unrelated quotations could possibly have led to the tragic death. He recalls the bizarre letters exchanged with ‘Ichiro’, a Tokyo judge who both led and followed him along the path to the crime; who both enlightened and disoriented him. With comic sensitivity and naivety, Thomas weaves together the colourful characters, ideas, parables, and epiphanies that compel him inexorably towards a shocking murder.	In Store Price: $AU23.95  Online Price:   $AU22.95 ISBN:   978-1-921240-11-9 Format: Paperback Number of pages: 169 Genre: Fiction Buy as an Ebook version - $AUD9.00 pdf upload.
Author: Trevor Ryan  Publisher: Zeus Publications Date Published: 2007 Language: English

Author Bio.    

Trevor Ryan is an Australian researcher and translator living in Tokyo .

ONE (part sample)    

Winter had come to Tokyo and it was tempting to stay indoors but my brother had given me the number of an old friend, Gemma. She was working long, blurry nights in a shot-bar for expatriates in infamous Roppongi and had a soft spot for strays. She looked after me well, and also a young Japanese artist named Mayako who was staying in her room. It was in Harajuku, a kind of Japanese Never-Never Land full of fancy dress and palette-crepes of glazed fruit and whipped cream.

Mayako did not take up a lot of space. She was tiny and lived with her paints in the low futon closet. Gemma introduced us and Mayako held out a handful of colourful, roughly hewn stones.

‘Please take your connection with one,’ she said, without explanation.

I picked a stone at random and she smiled up at me, then disappeared back into the closet, from which I heard the violent and unexpected noise of a hammer. When Mayako reappeared, the dark purple stone I had chosen was split in two.

‘Is this like a chain letter?’ I asked, bemused, as she placed one half in a tiny drawstring bag and presented it to me solemnly.

*

On our next meeting, Mayako introduced me to her boyfriend Araki. He taught her Reiki and rock healing and he played ambient records at nightclubs in Shibuya and Shinjuku. He was older than both Mayako and I—perhaps in his thirties—yet seemed to blend in easily amongst the gaudy, chirping teens of Harajuku. Though a heavy smoker and junk food addict, he preached purity. My body was hardly the model of good health and, as long as I humoured him over his alternative therapies, he had much authority over it:

‘It hurts here, right?’ he would say, face screwed up in concentration as he gripped the scruff of my neck tightly and pressed my face flat against a cafe table. ‘There’s a blockage of your energies ...’

He was a gentle but irresistible force, with his wooden geta sandals, ponytail, and stern, angular face.

Araki and Mayako invited me along to a New Year’s Eve party out in the countryside. We bought tickets at Shinjuku station and rode so far west that nobody was present to collect them at the other end. It was stirring to see the chaos of concrete, poles, and wires thin out slowly into mountains with clean snow-caps and locks of cedar forest combed neatly by distance. We pressed our faces against the window of the train like children and stared quietly.

We found the party at dusk by an unspoiled river in a sheltered valley. It was in a great A-frame house with a bonfire in the garden and a bath connected directly to hot springs deep below. The ground floor was decorated with coloured stones and dim green lights that could have been glow-worms crawling up to the apex of the roof. The host, difficult to identify in the gentle gloom, was finishing off his welcome to the many guests.

The crowd dispersed with a subdued excitement, some to the bonfire and some deeper into the house, which extended into the ground like a half-buried pyramid. I lost Araki and found myself standing by the bonfire with an awkward young man trying, like myself, to blend in from the fringes. As with many conversations I’d had in Japanese, I spoke confident nonsense and pretended to understand his replies.

Araki sent a friend, Kaoru, to find me. He wore sneakers, ripped denim jeans, a white T-shirt and a large army-green jacket with a fake fur lining around the neck. His shaved head protruded from the fur like a friendly, bearded tortoise. Like Araki, he spoke English well.

‘You didn’t talk to that guy, did you?’ he asked curiously.

‘Why?’ I replied.

‘Well … he doesn’t usually speak to humans,’ he grinned, and pointed to the stars.

We found Araki and Mayako in a giant kotatsu, a heated hole in the ground beneath a table covered by a thick blanket, often found in traditional homes, where a family would sit with their legs under the blanket drinking green tea and eating mandarins until their palms turned orange. The kotatsu on the veranda of the great house was designed for a very large family indeed. It already contained about ten people when I eased my feet in discreetly. All were listening intently to the host and I studied him thoroughly. He was in his fifties with shoulder-length grey hair and a heavy smoker’s thin, wrinkled skin. His eyes were dark and deep and seemed to flicker over me uncertainly. The kotatsu was making me drowsy and I made little attempt to follow what he was saying, though it seemed at times he was merely counting numbers in his gentle, inviting voice. I could not fight the dreamy warmth of the kotatsu and my head dipped slowly to the table.

When I awoke, I was alone in the kotatsu, but for a young woman who had also dozed off and stirred when I coughed lightly. I smiled and began my Japanese introductions but trailed off when the look of surprise on her face failed to soften.

‘I’m so sorry. I’m late for my healing time now,’ she said hastily, and disappeared into the house.

I nodded off again, wishing to follow her into the depths of the pyramid house but enticed by the lull of the river into an easy sleep.

Click on the cart below to purchase this book:                 

HOME PAGE

(c)2007 Zeus Publications           All rights reserved.