Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore - Softcover

Ray Loriga

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841955000 ISBN 13: 9781841955001

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2004

Synopsis

A salesman for The Company searches hazily for his wife, grasping at memories just out of reach. When they ask after her he tells them she's dead. They say she may be in Tokyo. Set in the very near future, Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore presents a dystopian vision akin to Orwell's 1984 - while evoking the bewildering visual universe of Blade Runner. One of Spain's most successful authors has produced a dizzying picaresque novel of drug-fuelled nights and wild sexual encounters: dealing with issues as diverse as loss, chemical dependency and the power of the multi-national conglomerates.

About this title

About the Author:

Ray Loriga is an author, screenwriter, and director. His first novel, Lo Peor de todo (The Worst Thing of All), was published to great acclaim all over Europe, and his second, Heroes, has confirmed his status as a cult literary figure. My Brother's Gun is the first of his novels to be published in English, and he has recently directed a film based on this book. His most recent novel is Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore, translated by John King.

From Publishers Weekly:

In Spanish writer Loriga's derivative novel, an anonymous narrator travels the world of the near future selling memory-erasing drugs to anyone with recollections they'd rather forget. The callous but despairing narrator peddles "chemical" for the "Company," which sends him around the globe, from Arizona to Bangkok, from Berlin to Tokyo. In each exotic port-of-call the agent makes a sale or two, has anonymous sex and collects memories he himself will one day have to erase. "There's no longer anything that chemical can't hide nor anything that chemical isn't capable of bringing back again," he laments. Occasionally, Loriga conjures up an interesting futuristic nugget (e.g., a computer program that reincarnates the dead), but more often he meanders into generic tangents that could have come from any other dystopian sci-fi novel. Sometimes his hard-boiled prose hits the mark ("Memory is like the most stupid dog, you throw it a stick and it brings you any old thing"), but often he tries too hard for neo-noir hipness ("Tijuana stretches out into the desert like a stain of oil on an ice rink"). The novel feels cobbled together from the work of past sci-fi masters: the cold and indiscriminate sexuality of J.G. Ballard's Crash, the hallucinogenic tone of Burroughs's Naked Lunch, the cyberpunk globe-trotting of William Gibson and the bleak not-too-distant-future of Philip K. Dick. In the end, Loriga's own story barely emerges from the homages to his predecessors.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1841955000
• ISBN 13: 9781841955001
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272