Book Info: Dragon Dance By Peter Tasker Kodansha International; ISBN: 4770029489; April 2003; pp. 272
	Utopia/Dystopia Celebrity Diet members Ishihara Shintaro Le Pen's National Front (French) Japanese Crime

Dystopian Japan
By: Yuki Allyson Honjo

Good thrillers depend on one key ingredient: paranoia. And paranoia is based on a proverbial grain of truth; a piece of hard evidence that lends credence to the bizarre and the improbable.

Take, for example, Peter Tasker’s latest pot-boiler, Dragon Dance. The author uses seemingly unrelated events in the media, melds them into our collective fears around a storyline, and makes the incredible, credible. 

Let’s talk of the seemingly incredible first. The year is 2006. Tokyo is, to put it mildly, a hell hole—the economy has collapsed from crisis and inaction. The affluent areas of Tokyo, such as Ginza, have been reduced to sleazy soaplands. Ordinary middle-class Japanese are homeless and are selling their organs to get by. The once safe streets are riddled with crime and civil unrest. Japan’s political leadership is bankrupt: Tsuyoshi Nozawa, a home-grown LePen, is a folk-rock star turned ultra-nationalist politician steps into the void. With lyrics as “Born in Japan, Born in Japan, I’m a throwaway samurai,” he launches a new political party. A mad Chinese general may or may not be orchestrating the whole affair as part of a plot to destroy Japan. The tension builds as a string of murders and industrial “accidents” rock Japan, destabilizing the nation economically and politically. Only Martine Meyer, the most famous Belgian reporter since Tintin, can save the day.

Sound improbable? Maybe. But Tasker makes it work, tapping into our underlying suspicions. He walks a fine line between the ridiculously hokey and the factually feasible. Indeed, the facts play into the novel; the Japanese economic miracle has been anything but, and has continued to degenerate over the past ten years. The country’s economic dominance was once a point of pride—could nationalism now fill that void? France as well as the Netherlands recently showcased ultra-nationalist leaders: Why not Japan? 

Now here comes the credible. Nozawa, the singer turned demagogue, is an all-too-familiar character. Japanese political parties have fielded a number of celebrity candidates in the past: the former governor of Osaka, “Knock” Yokoyama, was a comedian, and pro-wrestler Satoro “Tiger Mask” Sayama made an attempt at a Diet seat. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara was originally an Akutagawa prize-winning novelist (as well as author of the highly controversial, The Japan That Can Say No), and his brother, Yujiro Ishihara, a movie star. For that matter, Nozawa’s policies about National Regeneration and protectionism bear a striking resemblance to Ishihara’s speeches about asserting national pride and the “place” of foreigners in Japan. As Nozawa himself says, “I’m not anti-Western, I’m pro-Japanese.” Being “pro-Japanese” in this context, seems to mean burning one’s passport and rearming with nuclear weapons.

Tasker uses “ripped from the headlines” events to string the reader along. For example, the book opens with a horrific murder-rape of a young girl in Okinawa by US service men similar to the 1995 case: in the world of Dragon Dance, the crime is a cover for Chinese operatives to destabilize US-Japanese relations. An orange juice e-coli contamination at the “Starjacks” coffee chain, like the Snow Milk food poisoning scandals of summer 2000, results in the death and illness of Japanese consumers. A chemical plant explosion echoes the Ojima chemical plant explosion of the same year. 

Tasker populates his dystopic Japan with engagingly realistic characters clearly drawn from his twenty years in Tokyo as an equity strategist. Martine Meyer, the jaded and overly globalized journalist, is a quirky female protagonist—cynical and slightly bitter, but uncompromisingly fair. She is voice of reason in the book, albeit slightly neurotic. 

Nozawa is not the only character with a real-life counterpart. Tasker also uses personalities such as the Rupert Murdoch to flesh out Warwick Fletcher, and his enigmatic second wife, Jenny Leung. On members of the Tokyo foreign community, he writes with all the delicious causticity of a Truman Capote from his La Cote Basque days: “Gary Terashima” bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. Minor characters, such as the drug-addled English teacher, Jake McKloskey, are accurate archetypes of the sojourners who stopped off in Japan. Tasker rarely missteps, although the octogenarian Ken Shiina brings to mind the Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyage. “Many winds are blowing from many different directions, hot and cold, hot and cold,” the little old man elliptically tells us. “A storm is brewing, I think.”

On the surface it all appears to be part of a nefarious master plan worthy of James Bond’s nemesis, Blowfeld. However, Tasker does one better than the usual devices. Instead, he captures in Dragon Dance the various self-interested parties in the US, Japan, and China all trying to wreak their own particular brand of havoc and control. An Orwellian vision for sure, but one with a whisper of verisimilitude we can believe. Yes, it could happen to you, and yes, it could happen here. Be ready.