Billy Chaka’s in another pickle. The wiseass Cleveland-based reporter for popular teen mag Youth in Asia has been ordered by his editor to take some unwanted R and R after slapping the director of Wildman for Geisha! during the Chicago Film Festival. But he’s no sooner packed off to Japan than the cryptic night porter at Hokkaido’s Hotel Kitty keels over in his room. When Billy tries to inform the hotel staff of the porter’s demise, he learns of the almost simultaneous death of 27-year-old rock star Yoshimura Fukuzatsu. This is big news for readers of Youth in Asia; Billy’s editor cuts short his R and R and puts him on the case. And it’s only page 24.
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Adamson sees his hero as “sort of a goofier version of Philip Marlowe,” and his work reads like a manga-drenched homage to Raymond Chandler–one in which hard-boiled dames co-exist with cell-phone-wielding Shibuya teens against the candy-colored commercialism of the urban landscape. Though he’s since made a couple fact-finding trips, it’s unlikely his vision of Japan will take a dive into gritty realism in the next two Chaka novels. Says the disclaimer on Hokkaido Popsicle’s copyright page, “as for Tokyo, the city exists somewhere on the border of fantasy and reality. It’s just that kind of place.”
