RANSOM by Jay McInerney

 Refinished Fr 7/29/23

This is one of my paperbacks that I bought at The Book House, Rock Hill, Mo. on Th 10/19/95 and finished Fr 2/28/97. I got the wrist tattoo finished at Black Moon. 

Christopher Ransom is living in contemporary Kyoto and he is trying to 'find himself' through martial arts. His father is a hack television producer and wants Chris to return home. Ransom is friends with a man who runs a cowboy bar and at this bar he meets DeVito who hates Ransom on sight. The novel is about how DeVito tries to force Ransom into a death match. Also, Ransom's father has hired an actress to make Chris believe that she needs his help to escape the Yakuza. It's all a ruse and she's trying to get him to return to the US on orders from his father. 

The death match happens and Chris is killed. Literally he is cut in half and it was a total surprise.

I really liked the book and I'm surprised that it's not more well known. 'BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY' is McInerney's biggest book. 

From the book's page at Amazon:

"Ransom, Jay McInerney's second novel, belongs to the distinguished tradition of novels about exile. Living in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, Christopher Ransom seeks a purity and simplicity he could not find at home, and tries to exorcise the terror he encountered earlier in his travels—a blur of violence and death at the Khyber Pass.Ransom has managed to regain control, chiefly through the rigors of karate. Supporting himself by teaching English to eager Japanese businessmen, he finds company with impresario Miles Ryder and fellow expatriates whose headquarters is Buffalo Rome, a blues-bar that satisfies the hearty local appetite for Americana and accommodates the drifters pouring through Asia in the years immediately after the fall of Vietnam.Increasingly, Ransom and his circle are threatened, by everything they thought they had left behind, in a sequence of events whose consequences Ransom can forestall but cannot change.Jay McInerney details the pattern of adventure and disillusionment that leads Christopher Ransom toward an inevitable reckoning with his fate—in a novel of grand scale and serious implications."