Tokyo

Science fiction and erotica are blended in this experimental novel, Mejia’s ambitious but bewildering attempt to capture the “whirlpool heart” of Tokyo. Sadohara, an executive at a Japanese fishing conglomerate, is forced to contend with the mysterious appearance of a dead naked woman inside a freshly caught tuna at Tokyo’s famed Tsukiji market. Bodies keep appearing in fish, but Sadohara nevertheless orders the fish sold with the bodies still inside them. Rather than exploring the consequences of the scandal he has set in motion, Mejia shifts gears: his prose fragments into impressionistic, seemingly unrelated scenes in which a scientist offers up a test tube full of “the visible form of invisibility,” fetuses are bought and sold, and a man called S applies kabuki makeup. Sadohara is reintroduced, this time as a television writer, but is quickly displaced by his boss, M. Glimpses of a love triangle among M, his wife, and S fill out the rest of the novel, interspersed with photographs, illustrations, and quotations from Japanese literature. Mejia’s limited attempts to return to motifs such as Tsukiji and an image of “gloves edged with black fur” fail to establish any sort of accessible through line amidst the chaos. The result is a novel that, though audaciously conceived, lacks the rigorous structure that might allow the reader entrance into Mejia’s disorganized world. (Mar.)