The method actors

the long version

The Method Actors traces the disappearance of a young, gifted military historian named Michael Edwards from his desk in Tokyo and his sister Meredith's return to the city in search of him. Michael's research into international war crimes trials will take his sister through four hundred years of history, myth and propaganda, love and infidelity, religious transport and hallucination. The Method Actors is set in the flux of Tokyo at the turn of the century. With a cast of wealthy, restless New Yorkers, French kitchenhands, Russian hostesses, Canadian exchange students, Australian drug addicts, High Court judges, reclusive cultivators of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and young Chinese Americans living the high life, The Method Actors leaps from character to character, from past to present, from New York to Wellington to Tokyo. The rape of Nanking, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Japan's quarantining of Dutch merchants on manmade islands in the seventeenth century, all entwine to form a comic and often terrifying novel that reveals the dark heart, the centerlessness and moral ambiguity of modern gaijin life in Tokyo.