THE METHOD ACTORS

“An extraordinarily ambitious and often brilliant first novel. I envy Shuker his future.” 
—David Markson, author of WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS and THE LAST NOVEL

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 daring, beautifully lucid and stunning in its emotional and intellectual reach. This is a dense and multilevel narrative that questions the moral framework of the modern world.

Praise

“Brash and fearless, THE METHOD ACTORS is a self-consciously postmodern challenge to our perceived reality and its fictional depiction. . . . In controlled and erudite prose, Shuker takes these characters wherever his curiosity leads him. . . . At his best, however, Shuker is less investigative  than descriptive. He lets his eye wander over anything--a naked body, the anonymous expanses of an airport--with equal patience and attention to detail. Virtually every one of his book’s 500 pages has something worth lingering over, but many of the best passages are reserved for the cityscapes, which have an intensity reminiscent of William Gibson’s visions of gritty cybernetic future.”
—New York Times Book Review

“I admire Shuker’s bravura attentiveness to the little things as much as I do his shameless and bracing bid for a Pynchonesque grand slam.”
—Geoffrey Wolff, author of DUKE OF DECEPTION

“Shuker’s dizzying debut shimmers with authentic detail, an uncanny, otherworldly sense of place and a cast of believably hardcore hipsters.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This dense, ambitious, labyrinthine novel depicts the nuances of an outsider culture in a Japan so current it is slightly futuristic. An engrossing delight, richly imagined, in which cynicism and exuberance alternate in quick succession.” 
—Janet Fitch, author of WHITE OLEANDER and PAINT IT BLACK

“The Method Actors is a rich, complex, and accomplished novel that manages to capture the strange senses and emotions that, for foreigners, are the experience of Japan.”

—The Georgia Straight (Vancouver, BC)

“The use of multiple narrative voices, despite its high risk of failure, has become a calling card of young novelists. Rarely is it employed as effectively as in Shuker’s exciting debut, a sprawling tour de force of expertly drawn characters and ambitious reach.”

—Library Journal

“Shuker brilliantly captures Tokyo’s edgy atmosphere and the cosmic loneliness of his characters.”

—Booklist

“Think of the affectless youth who populate Bret Easton Ellis’ LESS THAN ZERO transplanted to Tokyo, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the world Shuker gives us. . . . THE METHOD ACTORS at its best and most serious is a reflection on history, its creation, and the uses to which it is put. Mingle these historical reflections with the intertwining lives of foreign youth in Tokyo and you have an interesting if—in the best postmodern style—inconclusive novel.”
—The Japan Times

“Edgy, appealing, smart and a lot hipper than I’ll ever be.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune

From THE METHOD ACTORS

I feel like dying from nicotine withdrawal and the queue is moving at the speed of proton decay and I can feel things happening out there, while I’m stuck in Narita on stolen farmland, stuck in this queue, things I’m missing, fifty miles away in the city, things that might have happened, missing, fifty miles away in the city, things that might have happened, things that will. I can feel people I know and people I don’t know moving through the floods of shining black hair in Shinjuku and Shibuya, fat tourists, staring over with glazed, semidesperate eyes at a lit-up Marlboro billboard the size of a house by Fuji Bank. Me, Michael and Ko and Jacques, my French “acquaintance,” and tall silent Catherine, a married “friend” of Michael’s, buying five 15,000 yen bottles of red wine in an underground Italian restaurant from sheer boredom and Jacques guzzling it from the bottle to freak out the waiters, and in the dim light the waiters thinking I’m Japanese, looking at me imploringly for help. I can feel the Koshukaido Avenue bridge outside the Shinjuku South edit flexing and shaking with trucks, thousand bursting at the seams of the sidewalks, the Don’t Walk icon holding them fast. The concrete of the bridge is broken by corrugated metal seams, the slack for concrete to expand in the summer heat, and the gray turned indigo in the streetlamps for me, twelve months ago.