Tokyo

Channeling influences as diverse as James Salter, Don DeLillo, and Yukio Mishima, this is a bewitching modern fable of memory, loss, love, and the search for belonging

Social psychologist Ben Monroe has returned to Japan. After a failed marriage in America, he finds himself compelled to seek out his former lover, Kozue, desperate to make sense of their brief, passionate, and unresolved love affair. Mazzy, Ben’s estranged 16-year-old daughter, reluctantly flies from California to join her father in Tokyo. On the plane she sits next to a troubled Japanese man who tells her the folk tale of Kaguyahime, the luminous night princess lost from the moon, and the men who became obsessed with her beauty. As the plane journey ends, the storyteller disappears. On the ground in Tokyo, Ben delves deeper into the Tokyo underworld, following the trail he hopes will lead him to Kozue. But Mazzy lives only for the present, angry at her father and determined to find herself in the city, yet unaware her every step is being watched by the storyteller, a cult survivor disturbed and adrift in the currents of the city. Both men are drawn towards the objects of their obsession—and with it, towards their fate—as past and present collide in Tokyo and beyond.