Charlotte, older sister of 18-year-old Adam Grey, is ostensibly taking a year off, traveling with her friend Alice. When Charlie goes missing while working in a hostess bar in Tokyo, Adam's shocked parents, already grappling with the rapid decline of his grandmother, seem to go numb. Fleeing his mother's tears, his father's "permanent mood of angry impotence" and the tightlipped local investigators, Adam withdraws funds, swipes a reserve credit card from his father's drawer and flies from Britain to Tokyo to find Charlie himself. Roughly the last two-thirds of Marks's (Zoo
) novel unfold as an anxious, third-person travelogue, describing a gritty mix of working-class expats, yakuza gangsters and hip Japanese teens enthralled with Adam's blonde hair. As he falls for—and sleeps with—Aiko (a smart, scooter-driving beauty), Adam questions everything from Alice's motives in reporting Charlie's disappearance, to his loyalty to his British girlfriend. Teens expecting a denouement equivalent to the ratcheting suspense of Adam's mission might feel slightly let down (Charlie has apparently simply absconded with Alice's boyfriend). Instead, the novel's strength derives from the pulsing slice of life, cut from Tokyo's neon landscape—from the tiny, stacked bedrooms of capsule hotels to the outré costumes of roving scenesters. The stranger-in-a-strange-land motif, spiked with sexy Japanophilia and British slang, should draw literate manga fans and Anglophiles alike. Ages 12-up. (June)
