Big Motorcycle

Fussy Frank Donner is a Tokyo guy.  A Viet-vet and journalist wanna-be, he worries about all of the above.  Donner and Buddy Nakamura are jogging along, and baby comes screaming over a railing then down, down, down--and into Donner's arms.  The baby's parents have just been hacked to pieces by a right-winger on a glory trip.  Donner saves her, he's a hero.  Next day, Donner loses her, he's an idiot--as his wife points out to him, just before she too dies.  And the kidnapper, on a tight Tokyo schedule, plans to save the baby too, from all the horrors of life. 

Tokyo bills itself as "the safest major city in the world," but to believe that you'd have to overlook a lot of drunks, punks, rapists, chemically deranged truckers and bikers, homicidal perverts, religious genocide squads, subway slashers, kindergarten butchers, grade school peer-decapitators, ritual cannibals, gangsters, anarcho-terrorists, and pachinko mamas.

And you'd have to ignore the thick, carcinogenic tobacco-haze that covers the whole city; the earthquakes, typhoons, and tidal waves; and the occasional batch of really bad sushi.

Big Motorcycle takes you on a wild ride through all of this and more, to and fro across Southeast Asia, back and forth over the past eighty-five years, through two major wars, along the meanest streets and alleys, behind the scenes, under the illusions, and into the heart of that weirdest of all major cities, Tokyo.