Reviews for Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore

The average rating for Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-20 00:00:00 Robert Gordon Better living through a bounty of chemicals, itinerancy, unfocussed energy, casual sex, and selective memory loss, in a world in which better is a relative term that easily'perhaps ultimately'inverts itself into negative scaling. Loriga's prose is relentless and hyperactive, his dystopian vision'an interconnected world of runaway consumerism and dissipated morality in which the most popular drug is one that effects the permanent erasure of an individual's short and/or long term memory'layered within a nameless protagonist's gushing narration comprised of two parts tedium and repetition per one of intensity and revelation. It's a shame that Loriga cannot downshift, as he continually springs lines, punctuates pages of free-flowing recollection, that arrest one's momentum with the impact of both what they are saying, and how, exactly, their stark emplacement affects the shattered shards that are the story's unfolding. How can we live with our memories, in all their artifice and existential gravity, their temporal blues in I minor? How can we not? For absent memories to situate us, stabilize us, propel us, life is performed within a vacuum; inconsequential, insubstantial, insufferable. Innocence is powerless'what's more, it is unnatural. The chemical, the pharmaceutical prodigy that performs anamnestic erosion, is marketed and distributed by The Company, a corporation as faceless as the narrator, who is one of its top salesmen. Apropos to our modern society, the drug is eagerly sought by murderers, child molesters, deflowerers, thieves, cheats, and their ilk: either as a salve for a disturbed conscience, or a spark to sexual rebirth and renewal. Those desirous of burning out dark remembrances and preoccupations whose roots are deep and thick are most at risk of the neuronal damage the chemical enacts; at its worst, sufferers become part of a legion of renewable blank slates à la Sammy Jankis. Yet human memory is a mechanism with a plethora of backup provisions and places of concealment; and it just may be those recollections that arise, unbidden and untethered to a chain of causality, that can do the most damage, invoke the strongest response, when they slip into the scrolling stream of present thought. The narrator, driven as most Company salesmen are into partaking of his own wares, makes a play to join the burgeoning ranks of emptied fleshy vessels'but his experience takes him to places that simultaneously muddle and reveal the pictures he is burning in a chemical pyre within. Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore invokes puzzlement, contemplation, distance, appreciation, boredom, poignancy, exasperation, amazement, decolorization, and the occasional hard-on, in no particular order. Cut this book by a third or more and you'd perhaps have something truly remarkable'for Loriga came close here to fibrillating my heart; as it stands, two hundred and sixty pages provides a repast that, while tasty and tempting, even touching, contains too much in the way of empty calories.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-10-28 00:00:00 Brian Wauford A stream of Kerouac-like impressions of drugs, booze, sex, swimmingpools, airplanes, told by a travelling drugs-salesman in a not-to-far slightly dystopian future, who dips too deep into his own medicine which causes memory-loss. The whirlwind of anecdotes and short story snippets is entertaining and the language poetic, but quickly grows boring, as no real story-development happens. But then, about half way in, our hero overdoes his drugs and lands in a clinic, where he undergoes treatment for his complete memory-loss. The change in the storyline got me invested again, as it even included a first-person account of a Penfield stimulation experiment.