[/floatl]"Escape From Amsterdam" by Barrie Sherwood"Aozora - idle university student, future crooked bureaucrat, fresh broken heart - has been playing too much mah-jong and now he's deep in debt. When Auntie Okane dies and leaves him and his sister Mai a priceless inheritance, he thinks his problems are solved. But they're only just beginning. Mai's disappeared and he can't get the cash without her. So begins a fast-paced adventure that takes Aozora to the deep south of Japan and the surreal environs of a Dutch theme park called Amsterdam. It sounds like a holiday, but Aozora is about to enter the real world... Featuring yakuza gangsters, motorcycle gangs, a phoney princess, a genuine rice farmer, tetrapods, topiary dinosaurs, pre-digested coffee, high-tech love dolls, Aozora's own photographs and a selection of Japanese manga, Escape from Amsterdam is playful, offbeat, and funny. It paints an unsettling portrait of contemporary Japan and introduces a strikingly original and inventive writer."
With that publisher's blurb, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this book is the first by Sherwood to deal with Japan. In fact, he wrote The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa
a few years earlier.
