Customer Reviews

Tokyo Vertigo

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Tokyo Vertigo is part travel book, part hallucination. Stephen Barber takes the reader on an extraordinary journey through the myriad districts of contemporary Tokyo, from the neon nightscape of Shinjuku to the artificial Daiba Island in Tokyo Bay, and reinvents the city as he goes along, evoking its unique ferment of sex, consumerism, and rampant visual imagery. Free of the tired old cliches about Japanese culture (no Pokemon, no ikebana), Tokyo Vertigo captures the energy and extremity of Tokyo now, recognising that the city, even more than the book, is the effect of constant and delirious reinvention. Along with Roland Barthes's The Empire of Signs and Chris Marker's film Sunless, this is one of the few truly original and essential meditations on Tokyo by a Western visitor.

I thought this book was going to be about the underbelly of Tokyo. Boy was I wrong. The book is only the means for the author to vomit out verbose convoluted phrases on his perceptions on yhe different districts in Tokyo. There is absolutely no information on these districts.He treats them more like living things that suck away the lives of their inhabitants. That is fine, but why is that? The author never answeres this. He seems to be the type that likes listening to himself use big words repeatedly. Well he does that here, but writes them not speak them. The only good quality the book has is a decent description of the work by choreographer/dancer Tatsumi Hijikata. Don't read this book it is a waste of time and energy.

While at the beginning I enjoyed what seemed to be a very different, manic, poetic take on Tokyo, I soon found myself skimming entire paragraphs and pages of non-sequitur. The author's descriptions are inaccurate at times and ludicrous at others. How exactly could FujiTV be "under" you as you travel the Rainbow Bridge? Hikarigaoka, desolate?
And how is it that more half the description of Shibuya could be only about the pervasiveness of English in Tokyo? Avant-garde, yes, and I was thrilled to see someone invest such rich description in a book about the city I so love, but Mr. Barber's Tokyo is clearly very different from mine. Perhaps a more jaded expat than I would find it good reading rather than slowly infuriating, but hard to say.

If you are looking for a travel book (as this seems to be erroneously labeled, both on its cover and in the section of the library where I happened across it), look elsewhere.