GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION

ith his second book Buddha Kiss Tokyo-based financial analyst/novelist Peter Tasker dares to write a thriller that both explains and satirizes Japanese society through the eyes of a Japanese hero. Mori, an old-fashioned private detective, has been retained to look into the death of a young woman. That sends him stumbling into an intricate criminal scheme that unites a hi-tech religious cult, the yakuza and a shady stock-brokerage house with access to foreign millions. Tasker's fictional imagination is impressively high-octane and is superbly backed by ground-level knowledge of how money and information flows in Japanese society. The other main character, a naive young British analyst named Mitchell, is used to good effect to give readers a fast, funny and glamorous joyride through the darkest reaches of Japanese society.