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Title: Tired and Tiring
Review: This lengthy first novel begins promisingly: a New Zealand historian based in Tokyo disappears, and the subject of his research -- Japan's murky wartime past -- is potentially explosive.But the writer's attempts to incorporate cross-cutting and other hallmarks of postmodern cleverness are merely that: clever. They fail to achieve any greater effect, and as you read on, you begin to smell the rat: the writer's inability to resolve narrative dilemmas, to develop any characters or even a voice that will cast a spell strong enough to warrant the narrative game-playing. The prose piles detail upon detail without finding its soul, and the writer has neither the intellectual heft nor insight of David Mitchell, nor the warmth and sensitivity of Haruki Murakami, both of whom seem to hover distantly above and beyond this book. The characters, both Japanese and others, are fatuous and flat.I am a lover of long books, but finishing this one was a chore.
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