Author Talk and Signing: Jake Adelstein

Meet Author Jake Adelstein
In conversation about his internationally bestselling Tokyo Vice and his newest book, Tokyo Noir: In and Out of Japan’s Underworld

In partnership with Scribe Publications

Japan Society is honored to welcome bestselling author Jake Adelstein for a special talk and signing in celebration of the release of the newest book, Tokyo Noir: In and Out of Japan’s Underworld.

About the Author
Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993, reporting in both Japanese and English. From 2006 to 2007 he was the chief investigator for a U.S. State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. He has been writing for The Daily Beast, The Japan Times and other publications since 2011, and was a special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in Japan, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States. He co-hosted and co-wrote the award-winning podcast about missing people in Japan, The Evaporated: Gone with the Gods in 2023. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (Vintage), which is now a series on Max, and also The Last Yakuza: Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld (2023). He has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, France 24, and other media outlets.

Moderator
Eric Ozawa is a writer and translator. His translation of Satoshi Yagisawa’s novel Days at the Morisaki Bookshop was an international bestseller that was short-listed for the British Book Award for Debut Book of the Year. His translation of the sequel, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, was published this summer by HarperCollins. His other writing includes fiction in Granta, Electric Literature and Columbia, and coverage of the nuclear crisis in Fukushima for The Nation where he interviewed and translated authors including Banana Yoshimoto and Koji Suzuki. He lives in New York, where he is a professor at New York University.

About Tokyo Noir
A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé and memoir. It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organized crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about—for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy—himself. And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden. 

The underworld isn’t what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlors are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Korean Japanese and North Korean extortion plots. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming. In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it’s like when you’re in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.

Autographs and Book Sales
Attendees of Japan Society’s Jake Adelstein talk and signing will be able to purchase copies of Tokyo Vice, The Last Yakuza and Tokyo Noir at the event or bring books from home for a signing session following the author’s talk.

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Japan Society programs are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional support for cultural programs is provided by an anonymous donor and the Sandy Heck Lecture Fund.