Saya is a beautiful nineteen-year-old Japanese. She has no difficulty attracting men of all ages and is happy to give them what they want. Sometimes they pay, sometimes they don’t, although she doesn’t like any of them, and as for love, does it really exist?

Then meet Bogey.

He is a middle-aged forty-something with a belly and graying hair who imagines himself as some kind of yakuza, a gangster. He gambles for a living, gambling on anything late into the night, mahjong, horses, biking, and the super-hot stock market where everyone always wins. He loves gangster movies and hanging out with rough people. Saya is dazzled by Bogey, he is known for his love of Bogart movies. She is fascinated by his strange selection of friends and is flattered by the attention of an older man, especially one like him. Inevitably, she becomes his lover without a moment’s hesitation.

“Whatever you do, don’t go with a player,” was the only advice her mother gave her when it came to men. But when did a teenage girl get any advice from her mother about men? Saya is no different. She takes the opportunity, she loves to snuggle into his warm body and rest her head on her fat belly, she will do whatever he wants. He even buys a cookbook and tries to cook him the food he loves, not that he’s impressed by that, preferring to eat in the seedy underworld he inhabits.

This is how Rika Yokomori’s novel opens, set in Japan and New York.

In some places, the book is presented almost like a reality television show. It’s like the camera is permanently attached to Saya’s shoulder. He’s rarely out of place as we learn about the exciting parts of his life and the mundane, almost in equal measure.

But this is a turn of the page as we watch Saya slowly become a wise woman in the world. Little by little he begins to see things as they really are. Everything, unsurprisingly, is not so rosy in the life of an aspiring yakuza moll. Hard times are sure to come.

Rika Yokomori has published over thirty-five books in the last fifteen years and this one is certainly worth a look. True, I guessed the ending some time before I got there, but that wasn’t much of a disappointment. There’s a peach of a final sentence to look forward to. If you like modern novels from Japan, you will find plenty here that will keep you interested. If you haven’t tried oriental fiction before, this might be a good place to start.

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