Tokyo Woes: A Novel

Bruce Jay Friedman

Sep. 2015 · Open Road Media

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In this laugh-out-loud travelogue, an average American man journeys to a country unlike any other: 1980s Japan

Early one morning, Mike Halsey leaves his sleeping girlfriend and his house deep in the woods to go out and buy the morning paper. His favorite deli is closed, so he keeps driving and winds up on an unfamiliar lakeside road. Then it hits him: the old wanderlust. The last time it struck, he ended up on the coast of Finland.
 
This time, Mike heads east—to Japan. He doesn’t like sushi all that much and has no idea what he’ll do when he arrives. Luckily, he makes a new friend on the plane. Bill Atenabe invites Mike to stay with his family in Tokyo—“We’ve got plenty of room by Japanese standards,” he claims—and the two pals are soon sampling all that makes the Land of the Rising Sun unique, from Peeping Tom tours to department store attendants who dust you off before you step into an elevator to computers with a sense of irony.
 
Mike quickly discovers, however, that not all is as happy as it seems in the Atenabe household. Bill’s wife is having an affair with a bamboo salesman, his son wants to give up a promising academic career to become a talent scout for a modeling agency, and his war-hero father is being forced into retirement. When Bill contemplates an act of desperation, Mike talks some good old American common sense into his friend and discovers the real reason for his own journey to Japan.
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bruce Jay Friedman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

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Bruce Jay Friedman (1930–2020) was a novelist, short story writer, playwright, memoirist, and screenwriter. He was the author of many books, including Stern (1962), A Mother’s Kisses (1964), The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life (1978), and Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (2011). His best-known works of stage and screen include the off-Broadway hit Steambath (1970) and the screenplays for the films Stir Crazy (1980) and Splash (1984), the latter of which received an Academy Award nomination. As editor of the anthology Black Humor (1965), Friedman helped popularize the distinctive literary style of that name in the United States and is widely regarded as one of its finest practitioners. According to the New York Times, his prose is “a pure pleasure machine.”