So, this Tune in Tokyo. Why Is It So Good? Everyone wants to escape their boring, stagnant lives full of inertia and regret. But so few people actually have the bravery to run, run away from everything for a while and selflessly seek out personal fulfillment in another part of the world where they don’t understand anything and won’t be expected to. The world is full of cowards. Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries, an irresistible new gay, left-handed, diabetic travel memoir by North Carolina native Tim Anderson, takes a heady ride through the great Japanese megalopolis, bobbing, weaving, and karate kicking its way through the shadowy, dangerous underworld of a Harajuku girl-phobic, viola playing, kabuki-tastic English conversation instructor on a mission to blast himself out of the creative and professional rut he’s in and also do some record shopping. Tune in Tokyo is a collection of stories illuminating the colorful gaijin life of a young and wonderfully hapless American gay man who, stuck in a rut with no good employment opportunities in his home city of Raleigh, NC, decides to jet across the world and magically make himself more marketable. He leaves behind his boyfriend, his cat, his CDs, and an increasingly misanthropic existential ennui and heads off to a city where the year is 2119 and the future is now. Or maybe tomorrow. Tune in Tokyo takes the typical image of the Ugly American, pretties him up, gives him some brains and a little dress sense, and launches him like a pinball into the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. Our hero is on a mission: to leave the cacophonous white noise of his home country behind and go to a land where he can’t understand a word; to shake himself awake and confront this new inscrutable world head on; to allow himself to be celebrated, dismissed, humiliated, and sometimes (though sadly not often enough), sexually objectified, all in the name of cultural exchange, broadened horizons, and personal fulfillment. Things begin swimmingly with the author being witnessed to in broken English by a Japanese holy roller named Miho Johnson under the electric lights of Shinjuku, the beating heart of the city. It is an unlikely event, yes, but as our hero quickly learns, Tokyo works in mysterious ways. As do its people, who happily assist our hero on his search for the meaning of life. Whether it’s Naomi, the bored housewife who seemingly takes English lessons in order to be able to make people uncomfortable in a second language (Chapter 9, “Problem Student”); Kawano, a young firey singer with Buddy Holly glasses that the author briefly plays drums for who sings in his own made-up language and can’t really carry a tune, but makes up for it with determination and some awesome recording equipment (Chapter 5, “…And on Drums”); her highness the Empress of Ginza, an aging but still vital kimono-clad painted lady who enjoys drinking tea, stirring tea, laughing, and threatening her absent family members in public (Chapter 7, “The Empress of Ginza”); the aggressively cute Tare Panda character that disturbs the author’s sleep and makes him afraid to close his eyes at night (Chapter 10, “Too Cute”); and the young Japanese siblings who see no need to have an after-school English tutor in their life and would rather spend valuable study time critiquing the author’s unwed status and making fun of his home country for not having a bullet train (Chapter 14, “Leggo My Ego”). All of these characters and more have their wisdom to impart to our hero. And you can rest assured that he most certainly will learn these lessons way too late, usually on the train ride home. But it is not only the natives that cause our hero to question the very reality he has come to know over his first quarter century (and a few years) of life: there’s also his fellow Westerners, who flock to the city in droves for reasons ranging from a love of the language and culture; an innate curiosity and hunger for knowledge of the East; an artistic/bohemian compulsion to live and create in a dazzling future-noir-city that is a combustion of ritual and chaos; a desire to escape family/lovers/uniformed officials sucking the life out of them back at home; or, as is the case with one of the author’s roommates and fellow teachers, because they were probably hopped up on Quaaludes and Jim Beam when they sat for the interview, didn’t realize what the contract they signed actually said, and couldn’t teach their way out of a brown paper bag (Chapter 4, “Bad Gaijin”). Yes, our Tune in Tokyo hero does not find himself mystified by the Japanese Tokyoites that burn through the city. He also trains his lazy eye on the wild and often expertly goofy expatriate community, the world of transients, post-graduate and post-post-post-graduate vagabonds that find themselves in the city and decide to stay at least until they’ve outstayed their welcome. These are his people, and he’s not 100% comfortable with that fact. These weird foreigners will fight for their jobs during a downsizing scare (Chapter 11, “Survivors”), fight for the microphone in the karaoke box (Chapter 15, “Karaoke Queens”), and fight for the affections/fend off the amorous advances of the new Japanese hottie in the tight pink sweater standing on her own in the school lobby (Chapter 8, “GaijinMan and the Ladykiller”). The author circles the city in search of inspiration and noodles for two years, diving into a new language like a cat into a bathtub, learning he should expect what he doesn’t expect when he least expects it, and hoping against hope that he will one day meet a practicing Japanese lesbian. Because surely they exist. Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries is a collection of fish-out-of-water stories in which the fish flopping around gasping for breath (and English-language magazines) in the open air of planet Tokyo must slowly but surely learn to breathe, gain his footing, and walk on his own two legs. How else is he going to take himself to the new Uniqlo, use one of those beer vending machines, or buy a Hello Kitty vibrator?