So I’m now back in Tokyo, after a two week sojourn in Melbourne – the more prominent Melbourne in Australia rather than its silly namesake in Florida, which is 32 years younger. I get parochial about this because the Melbourne in Australia is my hometown, and also the setting for my novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat – where, on 10 August, we finally did the book launch thing.

Well, we actually did go through it with the Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat book launch on 25th March and I’m still recovering – as we went right through from 6:00pm to 6:30am.

It was bloody brilliant, too.

Aside from the novel launch per se, we quite conveniently skipped out on any of the usual aftershocks that’ve been plaguing Japan lately, no-one glowed in the dark, and we screened The Maltese Falcon and The Third Man interspersed with anime gems like Tokyo Marble Chocolate and Mamoru Oshii’s Tachiguish-Retsuden; heck, we even showed The Karate Kid.

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These are strange times here in Japan, for all too obvious reasons – think that insanely big earthquake and tsunami on March 11 – and sometimes it feels like we’re collectively treading water awaiting the next Big Thing to transpire. Meanwhile the nuclear reactors in Fukushima (230km north-east of Tokyo) still belch scary looking clouds and we get shaken by dozens of aftershocks everyday.

It’s been mad timing for my new novel to come out; teaches me to write a yarn that’s been described in terms of “post-apocalyptic” and “dystopian”; I think I’ll veer towards the “noir” side of things here – since I’m having the Tokyo book launch of Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat on Friday 25th March at the Pink Cow in Shibuya.

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