Tokyo Junkie

“A delightful memoir of the author’s five-decade love affair with a city that “hypnotized” him and never let go.” – Kirkus Starred Review

“In his readable anecdotal style, Whiting waxes lyrical about the city he’s called home for much of the past six decades. From his military and student days to his transition to a salaryman and sportswriter, the book is a warts-and-all account that serves up a colorful menagerie of characters, from politicians to professional wrestlers.” – The Japan Times

“With a patter that lands like readers have pulled up a barstool to hear a traveler’s yarns… Whiting’s love for his adopted city remains constant and contagious in this collage-style survey.” – Publishers Weekly

“Tokyo Junkie is the hugely engaging and occasionally very funny memoir of a Tokyo insider who has grabbed all the excitement the city has to offer. He tells his story through various lenses – baseball, yakuza, and the amazing ongoing development of Tokyo.” – The Times Literary Supplement

“Tokyo Junkie is a likeable, breezy, well-written memoir, packed intensely with detail and eye-opening information about Japan, about the foibles of its author, and about bitter WWII enemies becoming steadfast friends in the following decades.” – Books on Asia

Blurb:

Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world.

Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city’s dark underbelly, interviews Japan’s baseball elite after publishing his first best-selling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation.

A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, “the greatest city in the world”, Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.