Buddha Kiss

The setting for Buddha Kiss by Peter Tasker is Tokyo, both its high-tech financial sector and its seedy sex-centered Roppongi district. The protagonists are Mitchell, a British securities analyst; his boss, the unpredictable market genius Yazawa; Mori, a freelance Japanese detective; Snowbird, a hideous haiku-writing crime boss; and Ono, a charismatic cult leader. The question is, What do the murder of a young girl, Yazawa's desire to persuade clients to invest in a less-than-stellar Japanese company, and weird, vision-inducing tea have in common? The answer, of course, is everything, although it takes hundreds of highly entertaining pages to figure out how and why. B+