The Method Actors

The Method Actors traces the disappearance of a young, gifted military historian named Michael Edwards from his desk in Tokyo and his sister Meredith’s return to the city in search of him. Michael’s research into international war crimes trials will take his sister through four hundred years of history, myth and propaganda, love and infidelity, religious transport and hallucination.

A cutting-edge debut novel, The Method Actors is set in the flux of Tokyo at the turn of the century. With a cast of wealthy, restless New Yorkers, French kitchenhands, Russian hostesses, Canadian exchange students, Australian ex-drug addicts, High Court judges, reclusive cultivators of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and young Chinese-Americans living the high life, The Method Actors leaps effortlessly from character to character, from past to present, from New York to Wellington to Tokyo.

The rape of Nanking, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Japan’s quarantining of Dutch merchants on manmade islands in the seventeenth century, all entwine to form a comic, hugely entertaining and often terrifying novel that reveals the dark heart, the centerlessness and moral ambiguity of modern gaijin life in Tokyo.

Part historical investigation, part thriller, part love story, The Method Actors is stylistically ddaring, beautifully lucid and stunning in its emotional and intellectual reach. This is a dense and multilevel narrative that questions the moral framework of our modern world.