Hustling The East

About the Book

All three of Tom Bradley's Japan novels are here collected in a single volume, including the Abiko Quarterly Award-winning KARA-KUN.

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The title character of KARA-KUN is an ethnic Korean who was in utero at the moment of the atom bomb's detonation over Hiroshima.  As a result of prenatal exposure to gamma rays, he is tiny and mentally deficient, like many such bomb babies, but his physical vigor is unimpaired.  Living on a makeshift skiff on the river that runs through town, Kara-kun only comes ashore to disrupt high-tone weddings at the cathedral.  It's a hobby for him.

Not surprisingly, Kara-kun disappears soon after spoiling a Yakuza wedding.  The main part of the narrative shows the efforts of the expatriate community (a very mixed bunch, from all over the first, second and third worlds) to locate him.  They send the reluctant and inefficient Sam Edwine to scour Hiroshima for some sign of Kara-kun, whom they've adopted as a mascot.

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In FLIP-KUN, Sam Edwine's family is infiltrated by a strange old man, a former inmate of a WWII relocation center for Japanese-Americans in the Utah desert.  Dismissed as a mere lonesome neurotic at first, he turns out to be a devotee of a certain well-established American pseudo-religion, whose patriarchs suspect Sam of being the author of a blasphemous book.

Soon, a western-style fatwa has been declared on Sam's head, and he is being stalked through Hiroshima by hit-missionaries, intent on assisting him in making blood atonement for his sins.

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In THE CURVED JEWELS, the Crown Princess of Japan gets tired of her living-death in the Imperial Palace, and escapes with the help of Sam Edwine and a shady compatriot.

The world knows the Crown Princess as a brilliant linguist and career diplomat who somehow got coerced into marrying the grandson of Hirohito.  The novel shows how that might have happened.

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"Tom Bradley's formidable prose evokes the work of two other towering Toms: Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Robbins (Even Cowgirls get the Blues).  Like Pynchon, Bradley possesses a technicolor imagination and the power to wield language like a stun gun; but he tempers his spiraling narrative with a reasonably linear story-line, and his cynicism with genuine affection for his characters, a la Robbins."

-Mainichi Daily News

"A merciless humor and tireless passion for words not seen since the King James Bible drive Bradley's work at bullet-train speed through unmapped areas of linguistic elasticity and imagination.  Readers once begun will find their concentration hostaged from all other diversions until they reach the last page....Chapters fade in and out via spiralling story-lines and correlate characters whose viewpoints variegate the perspective of the prose with an almost Joycean jauntiness...the limits of language stretch beyond belief in a tumult of volcanic vocabulary, pinning the eyes to each paragraph in kaleidoscopes of creativity unmatched in contemporary fiction".  

--David Wood, author of A Definitive Study of Sylvia Plath's Imagery

About the Author

Tom Bradley received his novelist's calling at the age of nineteen. He climbed up into the moonlit mountains around his hometown, where he got an unambiguous life-informing vocation, with physical symptoms and everything, just like Martin Luther in the electric storm. He moved to China and points east in 1985, and has been hanging around the left rim of the Pacific ever since, in a successful search for sinecures that steal virtually no time and absolutely no mental energy from his writing. His novels have been nominated for The Editor's Book Award and The New York University Bobst Prize, and one was a finalist in The AWP Award Series in the Novel. His short stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. One or two were translated and published in Japanese, or so he’s been told. Find out about all of Tom Bradley’s novels at http://literati.net/Bradley