Shopping

From AwardAnnals

Reviews

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If Graham Greene had turned 30 at the millennium and seen the shiny, noisy world of postmodern Tokyo, then he could well have written Gavin Kramer’s first novel, Shopping. The world of Shopping is the bleak, disorienting urbanity of English thirtysomethings at the sharp end of the Generation X culture; trying to survive on a diet of high finance, alcohol, fast food and Japanese “Yellow Cabs”, good-time girls whose designer wardrobes are paid for by obliging gaijin, foreign men with the right level of purchasing power.

The gaijin of Kramer’s novel are two lowly English lawyers, the unnamed laconic narrator and Meadowlark, a clumsily over-sized Englishman with a penchant for Chariots of Fire videos and portraits of the Queen and Margaret Thatcher which hang on the walls of his anonymous Tokyo flat. At turns repelled and fascinated by Meadowlark, the narrator follows his colleague’s descent into madness as he becomes entangled with the beautiful but vacuous Sachiko, a sixteen year-old streetwise schoolgirl who funds her desire for the latest designer labels by selling her plastic-wrapped soiled underwear to wealthy Japanese businessmen.

Kramer’s prose is precise and unrelenting in its grim, although at times darkly humorous exploration of the misunderstandings of cultural difference which define that most cosmopolitan and hybrid of postmodern cities, Tokyo. As the novel cruises the shops, bars, clubs, parties and fast-food joints of the city, and the heat, noise and glare burgeon, the sheen of the city gives way to an altogether darker and more sinister vision, which leads to the increasingly unstable Meadowlark running through the streets dressed as an enormous fowl, appropriately advertising the delights of CRAZEE CHICKEN. Shopping is a dark and uncompromising first novel, and if Kramer had glimpsed the future, then the lesson would have been: avoid Tokyo for the millennium —Jerry Brotton.