A review by sbaunsgard
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein

4.0

Jake Adelstein's page turner of a memoir about being a police reporter at a large daily Japanese newspaper in the 90s. The material is fascinating, funny, scary and heartrending. The book is partly about the business side of crime in Japan and partly about what it's like to be a reporter in Japan. You also get that horrible gut churning feeling of knowing these 'characters' are all real people. The crimes have real victims. The toll of the job on Adelstein (and the people he loves) is significant. Part of whether you will enjoy this book will depend on whether you like Adelstein as a narrator. If you do not, you will loathe this book. The tone is pretty casual, as if this guy were telling you about all of this at a bar. It's not poorly written. But it isn't really artistic or stylish as prose goes.

I enjoyed the book very much in a gut churning vicarious kind of way.

There are significant portions of this book about sex workers and human trafficking. There are also some portions that include descriptions of grisly violence. If that is something that is going to be very upsetting to you, I would avoid reading this. Obviously, due to the subject matter, I would not recommend it for children.