Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore

by Ray Loriga, John King (Translator)

Overview

This is a disturbing and exhilarating novel in which the anonymous protagonist, a dealer offering a range of the latest chemicals designed to make consumers forget everything, finds his past and present, along with his own identity, disintegrate under the effects of these 'drugs of oblivion'. Set in the very near future, this novel is very much in the style of dystopias like Orwell's 1984, while also evoking the bewildering visual universe of Blade Runner.

The protagonist moves through a world of cynical consumerism, whether in Arizona, South East Asia or Europe, under the constant scrutiny of the Company in whose products he deals. The alienating urban environment that surrounds him intensifies the feeling that he does not belong to any one country or place. His life is spent in transit on deserted motorways or in crowded airports and anonymous hotel rooms, punctuated by business contacts with similarly nameless customers and random, meaningless sexual encounters. There is no place for guilt or personal responsibility in a society in which one's acts are easily forgotten thanks to drugs designed to erase all memories from the mind.

The protagonist speaks with a disarming humor born of his detachment from life, personal relationships and the very consequences of his actions. What makes this vision so alarming is the fact that both its observations and its conclusions are entirely believable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802141477
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	08/09/2004
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.72(d)

Editorial Reviews

By turns dreamlike and disturbing, Loriga's chilling, concise prose shines a dark spotlight on the modern allure of pharmaceuticals' seeming power to assuage all ills. As a portrayal of narcotic dissipation, the novel ranks with William Burroughs' best.
—Carl Hays

Booklist

Ray Lorgia is a rock star of European letters, so it's no surprise that his novel reads like the drug-scorched tour diary of a one-man band. Published five years ago in his native Spain, Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore is the story of an unnamed fellow living in the not-so-distant future who roams the globe selling a miracle substance that erases bad memories. He takes lots of other drugs along the way, has a good deal of sex with attractive men and women in exotic locales (it's a post-AIDS era), gets high on his own supply and pauses in his peregrinations only long enough to deliver tough existential asides drawn from whatever chunk of his brain his product hasn't eroded.
— The New York Times

Sam Lipsyte

Memory-erasing drugs are the centerpiece of a bleak, absurdist vision of contemporary life. Our narrator is a salesman with no name. His current territory is Arizona, where he sells a chemical product called STM (short-term memory eroder); he also peddles LTM. When he's not working, he does drugs: some company product, which makes him the ultimate unreliable narrator, plus old favorites like cocaine. He also drinks, swims, and has sex. The sex may be with men or women, but it's always casual ("fucking strangers is what everyone is doing these days"). Biographical fragments (childhood in Spain, divorced parents) don't flesh him out. He may have a girlfriend in Tokyo, but she stays in the shadows, and his only relationship is with the Company that supplies him with product. The Company communicates through e-mails. Salesmen sometimes steal product and disappear, so they are frequently tested. When the narrator tests positive, he is suspended. His voice is deadpan and without affect. He will move from Arizona to Asia (Bangkok, Saigon, Tokyo), but he is still a man on a treadmill, going through the same motions; there is always a stranger to have sex with as planes fall out of the sky and suicides disturb hotel rooms. Spanish novelist Loriga (My Brother's Gun, 1997) could have added the spice of confrontations (with the Company or with the Promise Keepers, white Americans who kill the "memory murderers"), but he prefers to document the anomie of listless consumers around the world, not exactly uncharted territory. The narrator winds up in a Berlin hospital with aphasia. After tests, he will be fired by the Company and branded SICA (suspected of illegal chemical activity). At the end, he'sback in Arizona listening to a German veteran of WWII and pioneer of memory elimination, K. L. Krumper, who exists only on a monitor; his brain has been transplanted into a young Mexican girl. The author seems less than fully engaged in these tired science fiction devices. Sterile and lifeless. Agent: Howard Morhaim/Howard Morhaim Literary Agency

Kirkus Reviews