Goodnight Tokyo

(Paperback)

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Description

Matsui is the driver of a taxi the colour of the night sky. Every night between the hours of 1 am and 4.30 am, Matsui guides his taxi around the streets of Tokyo, collecting passengers and their stories.

Seen through the eyes of a cast of colourful characters, Goodnight Tokyo takes the reader on an intimate journey around Tokyo after dark, when Tokyo's eccentrics and insomniacs emerge, and a small grain of madness begins to germinate in the city's night air. Confessions of intimacy and loneliness merge with the surreal: the funeral of an old telephone, the flea-market in which objects are bartered for that don't actually exist.

Told over a number of nights - and punctuated by Matsui's dawn arrival at his favourite canteen for a plate of their famous ham and eggs - Yoshida weaves a web of stories that prove to be intimately cand compellingly connected.

Reviews

'"A tender ode to life's unexpected moments of happiness."' - Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany)

'"After closing this book, think of a friend or someone you know. Try to imagine their friends, the people they know whom you don't. Tokyo is made of such people. Definitely."' - Sankei Shimbun (Japan)

'"A must-read for Murakami fans."' - Hotlist (Germany)

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Author Bio

Born in Tokyo in 1962, Atsuhiro Yoshida is an award-winning book designer and renowned author of over forty books. Also translated into French, German, and Italian, Goodnight Tokyo is Yoshida's English-language debut.



Haydn Trowell is an Australian literary translator of Japanese fiction. His translations include Touring the Land of the Dead and Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada, The Forest Brims Over by Maru Ayase, and The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata.