Tokio

Seventeen-year-old Tokio has suffered from Gregory syndrome since birth, and his condition worsens bit by bit as he grows: his cranial nerves gradually die, his muscles atrophy, his consciousness slowly fades, until nothing remains but life lying in a hospital bed. In a Tokyo hospital, facing his only son, now in a coma, father Takumi Miyamoto tells his wife Reiko a secret he has kept for years: "Actually, twenty years ago, I already knew Tokio." The story thus returns to the Asakusa district of Tokyo in the Showa fifties. Twenty-three-year-old Takumi has no money, no job, and no real goals; he dreams all day of getting rich overnight and blames all of life's misfortunes on the mother who abandoned him years ago. One day, a strange young man who calls himself "Tokio" appears before him—familiar yet inexplicably dear, and knowing everything about him. Tokio drags him to Nagoya to investigate his origins, then accompanies him to Osaka in search of Chizuru, the girlfriend who left in disappointment—Chizuru has become entangled in a dangerous dispute, even mixed up with the underworld. The two young men rush about in unfamiliar cities and even encounter a tunnel fire of terrifying scale in Japanese history, barely escaping with their lives. In this journey across time, the young man trapped by resentment and self-abandonment learns step by step to take responsibility and to understand the choice his mother made years ago; and Tokio finally understands what he came back to the past to do. This is a novel that fuses fantasy, suspense, time travel, and family love, with brisk pacing and a warm, tear-inducing ending.