Hustling the East — Tom Bradley

Kara-kun is set in Hiroshima, fifty years after the fact, where Sam brings the foreign community face-to-face with the Japanese Mafia.

In Flip-kun, Sam is being stalked through Hiroshima by fundamentalist missionaries who suspect him of being the author of a blasphemous book, and have declared a western-style fatwa on his head.

In The Curved Jewels, the Crown Princess of Japan gets tired of her living-death in the Imperial Palace, and escapes with Sam's help.

A merciless humor and tireless passion for words not seen since the King James Bible drive Bradley's work at bullet-train speed through unmapped areas of linguistic elasticity and imagination. Readers once begun will find their concentration hostaged from all other diversions until they reach the last page.

--David Wood, author of A Definitive Study of Sylvia Plath's Imagery