The Tokyo Mariachi Blues

The Tokyo Mariachi Blues... Japan's lost decade of the 1990s is set to music and settles into a nightclub where a young department store clerk stumbles on a bit a fortune that changes her life. Pushed out of her Kobe home after the devastating earthquake, she finds solace in a man with a guitar and a few spare yen spilling from the edges of the Tokyo underworld. The heavy weight of the floating world rests on her shoulders as she supports a sister struggling to enter a top flight university and employs a girl with a tattoo gun who doubles as a bar bouncer.

Jon Herskovitz is an international corespondent who has reported from more than a dozen countries with Reuters News. He has been based in Tokyo, New York, Dallas, Seoul and Johannesburg and covered events ranging from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center to the tsunami that tore apart the northeast coast of Japan. This is his first novel.