Books: Tokyo Toontown

THE TWO HEAVYWEIGHT Thai kickboxing twins Maki and Aki didn't see the guitar coming. Billy Chaka, ace investigative reporter for Youth in Asia teen magazine and expert in kung fu, kenpo, Tae-kwondo, jeet kune do, capoeira and "many of the esoteric brands between," outfought the duo with a cherry-red Gibson and plunged back into Tokyo's pulsating streets. His mission: to figure out what a little bird had to do with the deaths of a night porter in Hokkaido and the country's most beloved rock star.

Chaka—fighting writer, Japan aficionado and Cleveland native—is back in the land of the rising sun for Isaac Adamson's second hard-boiled mystery, Hokkaido Popsicle (HarperPerennial; 329 pages). Banished to the northern island's remote Hotel Kitty for punching a film director in the face, Chaka is left to analyze the innermost thoughts of his roommate, a "six-pound female Japanese bobcat of distinguished-merit parentage" before an elderly porter abruptly keels over in his room. That same night, Yoshimura ("Yoshi") Fukuzatsu, leader of Japan's most popular rock band, turns up dead in a run-down Tokyo love hotel, providing Adamson with ample opportunity to riff on every Japan cliché in the pop-culture canon.

Yoshi's death unleashes our cooler-than-cool journalist into a series of life-or-death situations that Chaka takes as nonchalantly as Roger Rabbit's pal Eddie Valiant took Toontown. And Adamson, as he did in his book Tokyo Suckerpunch, evokes an animated Tokyo-as-Toontown that is simultaneously vivid, vibrant, gaudy and in glorious decline. It's a big adventure, but Adamson's teen rag writer takes it all with a shrug.