Customer Reviews

Big Motorcycle: A Tokyo Story

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Big Motorcycle is a frenetic ride into the weirdness of Tokyo that combines some of the post industrial hipness of William Gibson with the plotting intricacies of Elmore Leonard-all at a pace that makes Run, Lola Run seem like a stroll in the park. F.X. Donner, Viet Nam vet and former P.O.W., now a middle aged gaijin professor of English comp in Tokyo, has his generally sedate, mildly angst ridden life blasted into hyperdrive when he reflexively performs an act of heroism by catching a falling baby. From that point on, Donner finds himself drawn into the Tokyo underbelly of yakuza, religious cults, right wing and left wing revolutionaries, pop culture entrepreneurs, and a very disturbing serial killer. As the action races along, the individual weirdness converges in bang up race to stop a killer. Big Motorcycle is ghastly, cool, fast paced, exciting and...funny.

This novel has the slick plotting of John Sandford, the wild humor of Carl Hiassen, the erudition of David Foster Wallace, and the brutal bite of James Ellroy. It's a story of Tokyo, as the sub-title suggests, but Tokyo is a city of foreigners and natives trying to come to terms with each other. So any story of post-WWII Tokyo is a story of the world. Great characters in this book, terrific dialogue. One of the dust jacket reviews said simply, "Ride this Motorcycle." Exactly: this novel is the sleeper of the year.

Reads like a Coen Brothers movie. Humor with razor edges. Inadvertent violence mixed with good intentions. Big City weirdness, where the fringe jaggedly intrudes on the norm. But uniquely Tokyo - a Möbius strip of cute and creepy. Darkly comic. Funny stuff. Except for the villain; Logan doesn't invent a new monster, just chillingly describes the diminutive one that exists among us.

Big Motorcyle is brilliant, charming, humorous, a page-turner, long and absorbing, and I'm just getting started. The story is an exquisite portrait of Tokyo's "It is all so . . . butchery," in the words of Miyuki, Logan's charming TV reporter. Miyuki is one of numerous, strongly developed characters in a cast of Japanese and American, venomous and iconoclastic, weird and zany, fanatical and humane persons in the Tokyo cosmopolis. F.J. Logan obviously knows modern Tokyo and its history exquisitely well, including his guidance into the Japanese language itself. The work pours forth, evoking the dark, complex tangle of the city's freeways, railroads, hotel and nightclub districts, always with good humor, with continuing satire and comedy from wordplay to belly laughs, and with pointed, evocative language. F.J. Logan is a wordsmith par excellence--freshness, playfulness, exactitude, and the well-wrought page. This work is outstanding, a masterpiece.

This book catches the reader's attention instantly. It is fast paced and exciting, violent and tender. Have you ever driven through a neighborhood at night and caught a glimpse into the homes that has left you wondering what the occupants' lives are like? Reading this book is like that. It's an intimate, almost indecent look into the hearts and minds of its facinating characters. Logan has an innate understanding of Japanese culture and the people who inhabit it. He has managed to weave together a story with people whose lives are interrelated. The result is amazing! This is great book!

Big Motorcycle is at least a half-dozen books: pulse-pounding action, horror, wild humor, crime, social history of Tokyo, love and more love. Logan does on the page what the Cohen brothers do on the screen--in, for example, Fargo: there's slapstick and depravity and nobility all mixed together, but somehow working, as in life. And Logan can plot right alongside Joseph Heller: he's got at least seven stories happening simultaneously, weaving in and out of each other, building on each other. The characters, too, are fine: Americans and Japanese both. One of the early reviewers of this novel wrote that the reader "really cares about the people in this book, cares what happens to them." And it's true. Logan's got Elmore Leonard-grade dialogue too, and the sardonic brilliance of Jonathan Swift. Call him a sort of latter-day Nathaniel West--or, rather, East. Terrific, loved it, a real page-turner--with a whole lot of pages to turn. A classic.