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Cherry Whip
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
ISBN13: 9781069096579
Publisher: Donovan Street Press
Published: Sep 14 2025
Pages: 270
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.61 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Originally released 20 years ago, this superb novel returns in a well-deserved reissue. ...Hiroshi's recovery, family dynamics, and inner life are all fascinatingly described in rich detail. This edition features a new foreword and afterword, offering insightful context on how the author's own time in Japan inspired this irreverent, poignant, and wondrously odd tale. - Alexander Moran, Booklist (Starred Review)
The poignant and hilarious tale of a Japanese musician's struggles with genius and illness in a vividly realized New York City.
From the moment the deeply eccentric Hiroshi, a budding Japanese jazz genius, hits American ground, the ground starts hitting back with everything it's got -- just as he is to begin a high-profile gig that promises to make his career.
Hiroshi's experiences in New York are exhilarating and humiliating, thrilling and traumatic in equal measure. As the quirky, disaster-prone, and language- and music-obsessed artist struggles to recover both emotionally and physically from a paralyzing illness that may render him unable to ever again play his clarinet, he must also cope with the long-distance betrayal of his beautiful girlfriend and with his sublimated guilt over his role in the death of his sister many years ago, at the dusty end of a mysterious route she called The Forbidden Pathway in the tiny country town in Japan where they grew up.
This seriocomic novel, densely populated with quirky characters, is a love letter to New York City and to the English language. It also shines a spotlight on one fairly peculiar corner of the Japanese sensibility embodied in its hyperconscious but absentminded, sensual but abstracted, intelligent but terribly innocent hero, a Japanese Lucky Jim, who comes to terms with becoming an adult and respecting his gifts against the dual backgrounds of a mysterious pathway in Japan, which now exists only in his memory, and what he lovingly describes as the filthy charm of New York City, in the only too-real present day.
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