Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries - Paperback

by Tim Anderson (Author)

Everyone wants to escape their boring, stagnant lives full of inertia and regret. But so few people actually have the bravery to run, run away from everything and selflessly seek out personal fulfillment in another part of the world where they don't understand anything and won't be expected to. The world is full of cowards. Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries, an irresistible new gay, left-handed, diabetic travel memoir by North Carolina native Tim Anderson, takes a heady ride through the great Japanese megalopolis, bobbing, weaving, and karate kicking its way through the shadowy, dangerous underworld of a Harajuku girl-phobic, viola-playing, kabuki-tastic English conversation instructor on a mission to blast himself out of the creative and professional rut he's in and also do some record shopping. Tune in Tokyo illuminates the colorful gaijin life of a young-ish American gaywad who, stuck in Ennuiville with no good employment opportunities in his home city of Raleigh, NC, decides to jet across the world and magically make himself more marketable. He leaves behind his boyfriend, his cat, his CDs, and an increasingly misanthropic existential lifelessness and heads off to a city where the year is 2119 and the future is now. Or maybe tomorrow. Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries is a collection of fish-out-of-water stories in which the fish flopping around gasping for breath (and English-language magazines) in the open air of planet Tokyo must slowly but surely learn to breathe, gain his footing, and walk on his own two legs. How else is he going to take himself to the new Uniqlo, use one of those beer vending machines, or buy a Hello Kitty dildo?

Author Biography

Tim Anderson has done many amazing things in his short life. Well, two amazing things. OK, one thing that he did twice. But he's got nothing on his older brother, who can play his teeth like a xylophone with his thumb. Tim has made a name for himself writing for small publications that hit the stands, cause a splash, and then die die die, among them Raleigh, NC's Spectator, The Hatchet, Brightleaf: A Southern Review of Books, and Lather Weekly. He has also been a contributing writer to Seattle's Resonance, which amazingly is still alive. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and was inducted into both Phi Beta Kappa and the Golden Key National Honor Society. These distinctions have yet to pay off. Tim is an editor in New York and lives in Brooklyn with his boyfriend and his cat Stella. His favorite Southern state is Hawaii. He blogs at seetimblog.blogspot.com. Visit the Tune in Tokyo website at tuningintokyo.com.