SEVEN DAYS IN TOKYO, emotionally intense yet affectively distanced

SEVEN DAYS IN TOKYO
JOSÉ DANIEL ALVIOR
Unbound Firsts (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.90 trade paper, pre-order for 1 July 2025 shipping

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Two strangers meet in Manhattan and spend a perfect night together. In Tokyo, they have seven days to see if that one night might mean something more.

Landon’s living alone in Tokyo as a British ‘expat’, Louie’s visiting while he anxiously waits for approval on his US visa. Against the backdrop of a misty Tokyo Spring, their precious time together is spent wandering into side streets and coffee shops, sharing unmade beds and plates of food. But as the days tick by, Louie’s expectations start to overtake reality and he falls too deeply for a life that’s not yet his.

Breathtakingly tender, Seven Days in Tokyo is an astonishing debut about the intricacies of desire and a search for belonging. It is a lyrical, immersive portrait of how some things, however beautiful and profound, are destined to be as short-lived as the cherry blossoms.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are some moments in life that are perfect: sounds, colors, smells, companions...everything is perfect. They live forever in one's mind. They have in mine anyway, and I hope they do in yours as well.

Problems are created, then multiplied, when one or more of those involved stay in that moment long past the time it has ceased to exist. Clinging to a beautiful bygone image of something that, for whatever concatenation of causes, could not be. I've done that; it's a greedy response to a cosmic gift, but I'm pretty sure if one's never tried it the futility and the stunning destructive energy of it simply don't become part of one's usable experience.

This is the story of that one Perfect Moment℠ and of how horribly the effort to cling to it, to summon it back, hurts all involved and all who are around those involved.

The story is indeed tender, and it (at times) took my breath away with the mannered, distanced-from-disaster way it told the hard parts. I can only say that every story beat, every emotional trigger, every exhausted introspection, matched exactly what I'm familiar with. “How many lives are we allowed in a lifetime? I’m given a peek of this other world and feel a great sense of gratitude.” Gratitude without common sense, I fear, is what sets the painful reckoning with the incalculably precious gift of A Perfect Moment℠. Falling in love with a one-night stand? A bad misuse of the enormous gift of perspective the event gave you.

Details aren't mine to reveal, the Spoiler Stasi has agents in each and every nook of the bookish world. I'll say that Louie is more than a little spoiled as the (stochastic) trip through his past shows. I might've preferred a very slightly more linear look into his past, but that would be a different book, one less immersive in its ease of scansion, used in its archaic climbing sense. There is effort required to get this story into your head. It's rich and evocative, but not the way ice cream is rich and cloying; more like the way lobster is rich and evokes its home the sea.

I suspect many hoping for salaciousness will leave the read not fully satisfied. Intimacy is the focus here: accidental; granted; withheld; refused. One important note is the Japanese trait of wearing masks in public strikes Louie pretty forcefully, as he mentions it though without ever bringing up COVID. I think, in the absence of explicit dating, that places the action in 2019 or before, or else the editor was uncharacteristically sloppy with that detail. I doubt this because the masks were so perfectly symbolic.

You'll see. Or I hope you will. I can't offer all five stars but that's because I wanted more Landon in Louie's book. It's not instantly obvious to me that Landon remaining more or less a screen to project onto was an enriching authorial choice. I was aware that I knew little enough about Landon as a man to get where Louie's fantasies mapped onto the real man.

They're not fatal flaws to me, just points where I expected a more polished performance from a writer with these chops. And what chops! I was transported to Tokyo. I don't mean a native's Tokyo. I mean the one a man truly and deeply in love would notice from the ten million things bombarding his senses. Louie is Christopher Isherwood's camera: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

Evoking that state of utterly aware passivity is a huge feat. It's a deeply moving story told well...but perfection is wihin Author Alvior's grasp. I want him to reach it.